Food and cravings are two of the main reasons for weight gain and why people struggle with their weight. Feeling that hunger or a craving for a specific food can make it difficult to focus on eating healthily and can end up making you feel worse. However, there are certain things you can do to help control your cravings and reduce the feeling of hunger. Here are a few tips to suppress your appetite in 6 effective ways.
Drink Coffee
While coffee has numerous benefits, one of the most popular reasons people tend to drink coffee, aside from it boosting mental alertness, is because it suppresses the appetite. Because it contains caffeine, it aids in curbing your hunger and prevents you from feeling the desire or need to eat for a while.
Coffee also contains other elements such as chlorogenic acids which aid in reducing hunger levels and suppressing the appetite. However, while it sounds like a pretty solid way of fighting those hunger attacks and reducing your calorie intake, you should be careful with the amount of coffee you drink per day as it can be unhealthy for your heart and body to excessively increase your caffeine intake.
Use Appetite Suppressants
When it comes to food, feeling hungry can lead to you making unhealthy choices. That feeling of hunger can result in constant eating and increase your calorie intake which can be a nightmare for anyone trying to lose weight.
In order to try and get your weight under control and make healthier choices when it comes to your diet, you could start adding appetite suppressants to your daily diet. While there are so many options available, the ultimate resource to help you curb your appetite should include natural ingredients. Since chemicals can have a negative effect on your hormones and sometimes even result in decreasing your metabolism, it is always best to go with a natural source that will not harm your body.
Appetite suppressants work on decreasing the hunger hormones in your body by using natural sources of foods and elements that have the ability to control these hormones. This can significantly reduce your cravings and have you making healthy food choices without being under the influence of hunger.
Add Protein To Your Diet
One of the best ways to suppress your appetite is by eating foods that will make you feel fuller for longer periods of time. Instead of eating salads or vegetables that will be easily digested and leave you hungry right after you’ve eaten, you should focus on increasing your protein intake.
Red meats, especially, tend to make you feel fuller, curb your appetite, and reduce your calorie intake during your upcoming meals. When adding more protein to your diet, you not only reduce the hunger hormone in your system, but it also increases the amount of appetite-reducing hormones that suppress your appetite.
Most studies show that people who add protein to their diet tend to eat fewer calories, feel less hungry, and can reduce their meal portions accordingly.
Add More Solids To Your Diet
While drinking water can help fill you up, liquids tend to be very easily digested. The process itself of breaking down and digesting solid foods takes more time and energy in your system, leaving you feeling full for longer periods of time. However, because liquids tend to be easily broken down and digested, it does not have the ability to fill you up and can leave you feeling hungry in shorter periods of time.
That’s why when making food choices, opt for those that will keep you fuller as well as decrease your calorie intake at the same time. This could mean that it is best to eat an orange rather than drink orange juice as it would last longer in your system. In general, foods that need to be chewed make you spend more time eating them and have a more positive effect on suppressing your appetite for longer periods of time.
Avoid Eating Sugars
One of the reasons sugars are usually off-limits when dieting is not just because of their high-calorie intake, but also because of their negative effects on your cravings. Eating foods rich in sugar, especially fructose can significantly affect your hunger levels as it promotes the hunger hormone ghrelin as well as reduce other appetite-suppressing hormones.
This leaves you craving more sugary foods and keeps the cycle going, making it difficult to control your eating habits or curb your appetite. These sugary foods can include cakes, chocolates, sweets, and desserts, but also food rich in carbohydrates and starch such as pastries, cereal bars, ketchup, milkshakes, granola, and many others.
To help you understand how much sugar each item has, you can always check the nutrition facts on the label before eating to help you make wiser and well-informed decisions.
Get Enough Sleep
While this sounds completely off-topic and irrelevant, you’d be surprised how much impact sleep can have on your appetite. When your sleep is disrupted, your hormones go crazy and everything is off-balance. This can reduce the number of hormones produced naturally in your system related to hunger and can leave you unable to control your appetite.
When you haven’t slept well, you tend to eat more to feed your body and gain more energy, resulting in an increased calorie intake and most probably, eating more food with high sugar levels. As mentioned above, this will only lead to an increased craving and a constant desire to eat.
In order to moderate your hunger cravings, you should not only ensure that you get at least 6-8 hours of sleep per night, but you should also try to sleep early to regulate your hormones.
Feeling hungry all the time makes it difficult to make wise food choices and that’s why it needs to be regulated. In order to suppress your appetite and reduce your hunger levels and cravings, it is important to be wary of the types of food entering your body as well as increase the foods that can help reduce your hunger hormones.
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