You have to reduce your calories if you want to control your diabetes. Carrying excessive body fat shoots up your body’s resistance to insulin, and makes your blood glucose management more challenging. You can shred off your body fat by incorporating a healthy diet plan and reducing your calories for your better health.
How can you reduce calories for better health?
You have to burn a piece of bread or a slice of pizza from your daily diet instead of following a crash diet program. By reducing your calories, you can easily control high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excessive fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol levels significantly.
The easiest way of reducing calories is to add your total number of calories per serving of all the food you eat, and then reduce the total calories by 400 to 500 per day by either removing some foods from your daily diet or reduce portion sizes. Some websites list the calories per serving of many foods. You can check them out and calculate the total calories per serving of the food you eat daily. (I have added three best website links at the end of the article for your convenience.) Try to eat smaller portions of your daily diet food. Eat 4-5 times a day, no issue, but it should be in limited quantity.
Nowadays, you will find nutrition labels with calories per serving information on all packaged foods. Make your habit of reading food and beverage labels you use, noting the total number of calories and the serving sizes.
Another way of reducing your calories
If you don’t like counting calories, then there is another way for you. You must limit your daily food intake. Add foods in your diet that are low in calories like salad, pulses, oats, fruits, and vegetables. There are some dietary guidelines issued by the American Heart Association. You can read them here. Follow these guidelines. It will help you to choose your foods wisely rather than focusing on numbers like total calories or calories from fat etc.
Whatever approach you adopt, the most successful method is sticking with a regular eating schedule. You plan your eating schedule of meals and snacks taken at fixed times each day. And, you record what you eat. As I said earlier, eating meals and snacks 4-5 times a day with no more than 4 hours apart can help you from starvation that can lead to over-eating.
By recording what you eat in a day will help you in making a more sensible eating plan. This written note will also help you in identifying the time when and how you get off track with your great reducing calorie goal. Make it a habit of weighing yourself every fortnight. It will also fire more enthusiasm in yourself to achieve your target.
Be active: Do some exercise
Your diet is a vital factor in reducing your calories but, exercising is much more important than your food, and doing both together will boost your goal to achieve your targeted calories.
Make your habit of walking an average of half an hour a day. You don’t necessarily have to sweat for hours at the gym. Find different ways to make yourself active throughout the day. After dinner, instead of hitting your couch and watching TV, you better take a 10-minute walk outside your residence block. Stop your car far away from your destination so that it can add more steps. Instead of going from elevators, take the stairs wherever it is possible. All these small but positive changes make a big difference over time.
Consume more fiber
Reducing calories is not always easy when you are overweight or obese. The best way to kill your hunger is by consuming more fiber. Fiber slows down the digestion process as it moves through your body. Your body cannot break this fiber quickly, and it also helps to control your blood sugar levels.
Try to eat fiber-rich foods because they are lower in calories. You can eat a larger volume of fiber-rich foods than other foods for the same number of calories. Since fiber takes a much longer time to digest, it can help you feel fuller for longer.
Fiber-rich foods include fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, chickpeas, black beans, and lentils.
It is vital to eat healthily and exercise regularly, even after reaching your calorie target. That’s why you set realistic goals from the beginning. The healthy habits you initiated to reduce your calories should last a lifetime so you can keep it off.
List of websites that show calories per serving of the food
Here is a list of three best websites that will help you to calculate your total calories per serving of the food: