Diet

[elaineanne1]

I eat a mainly veggie diet and I very rarely eat sweets, I do like rice cakes and ryvitas but struggle with nibbling when stressed(too often), I do exercise at least twice a week plus I walk everywhere. just wondered if anyone had any advice that would help. I am a mental health carer which is why I get stressed.

[angelikajohnston]

This is nice post to update people regarding weight loss. I think protein powders are pretty important if you are vegetarian, but I also believe the other calories are important too. You can also use seeds, nuts and veggies on a regular basis.

[Hidden]

HI elaineanne1,

When you restrict your food intake for any reason, it becomes harder to ensure you get in the full range of nutrients - so do make sure you're getting in your vitamins, minerals and things like EFAs.

Stress alters your hormones and actually tends to inhibit fat burning, so it's worth investing a bit of time and effort into thinking about how you manage your stress. Exercise and activity helps there too.

Be cautious of nibbling - you can take in a lot of calories through 'mindless munching' especially on things like nuts, Even a mere 50 g of cashews will give you over 500 kcal.

If you're eating as a comfort / de-stressing mechanism, I would suggest trying to find other sources of comfort or ways of de-stressing other than eating.

There are strategies for controlling such eating and these are basically stop buying and having available to you the foods you nibble on, wean yourself off of them by reducing the amount of nibbling you do over a period of time, substitute 'bad' nibbles for better ones, or delay / postpone the nibbling until the urge to nibble has subsided a bit.

It's much better to get into - as much as is possible - a more structured meal-snack-meal-snack-meal-snack regime if possible so that you eat something every 3 to 4 hours, even if the snack is only a 50/60 kcal piece of fruit.

And often, truth be told, nibbles are mainly calories and little other nutrition - a little, healthy nutritious snack would probably be a much better idea.

Good luck with your weight loss journey.

[wandg]

I pre-plan the snacks that I am going to have for the day - ie count out the almonds I carry in my bag, get my two oat cakes out and my little apple and satsuma and find that if I already have these with me and have counted them in to my daily allowance it is much easier to stop getting through a pack of 4 oatcakes or a bigger bag of almonds. Hope that helps and good luck!

[elaineanne1 in reply to wandg]

Thank you this is a good idea and I will try it.

[elaineanne1]

Thank you for the helpful advice.

[Mazhar1]

Hi, If you like to take a healthy snack, then I recommend a pear a day, its simple and keeps the digestive system active. I also use a protein cookie with warm milk before I sleep. The cookies and plan are available on visalus.uk.com.

Good luck with your progress.

[elaineanne1 in reply to Mazhar1]

Thank you for the advice, I tried to look up the cookie recipe but it said the site name was invalid.