12 Weight Loss Tips That Have Nothing To Do With Giving Up Food

Life’s short and food is glorious.

If you’re trying to hit weight loss goals in the new year, you may have decided all those tantalizing office snacks and dinners out are off the table. But luckily, losing weight doesn’t have to require giving up your favorite foods. Often, just a slight tweak to your environment or behavior, rather than changing the actual menu, is all it takes.

Check out the 12 tips below, which can help you stay on top of both your food bucket list and your health goals:

1. Eat off of a plate, not out of the bag.

Seeing is believing, so it’s important for portion control that you see how much of a snack you’re ingesting before you dive in. Otherwise, you could consume way more than you mean to. If you’re truly devoted, you might divide a snack into individual portions even before you get munching (store the rest for later in sealable plastic bags). This’ll help you stick to one serving.

2. Make that plate a small plate.

Many studies have examined if eating from a smaller plate helps people consume fewer calories. According to a recent analysis published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, reducing plate diameter by 30 percent reduces the amount of food eaten by 30 percent. Simply changing the size of the plate from which you serve yourself could help you cut calories. Pretty cool.

3. And a blue one.

This suggestion is based off a series of studies that found when a food’s color contrasted with the plate on which it was was served, fewer calories were consumed. In one experiment, researchers found that people ate more spaghetti and marinara sauce when it was served on a red plate that matched the sauce than when it was served on a white one. The contrast, according to the scientists, makes the portion appear larger. Experts often recommend blue because not many foods are blue, but if blue doesn’t fit in with your kitchen decor, fear not. To put this trick to work, just make sure your plate doesn’t match the color of your dinner.

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