How To Reduce Hunger Cravings For Weight Loss
10 Tips To Stop Hunger Cravings Now
On today’s episode of Live Lean TV, I’m sharing 10 tips on how to reduce hunger cravings for weight loss.
If you’re currently overweight and eating in a calorie deficit, one of your top priorities to sustain your weight loss, is to learn how to reduce hunger cravings.
One of our main goals here at Live Lean TV, is to not only help you lose weight, but to teach you habits that will help you sustain your lean body, forever.
We do this by changing your mindset from following a short-term and extreme low calorie diet, to following a lifestyle approach to nutrition and exercise.
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Our Live Lean lifestyle approach is designed to program your body to burn more calories throughout the day, and reduce hunger cravings, so you actually eat less calories, without feeling deprived.
This healthy combination ultimately leads to your body burning more stored fat for energy, while boosting your metabolism, and maintaining and building new lean muscle.
The Live Lean approach to weight loss is fueling your body with the nutrients it needs to thrive.
This will help you turn on your fat burning switch, and start burning stored body fat for energy, not sugar, and not metabolism boosting muscle.
To start lets talk a little science, without getting too silly
There are certain hormones and chemicals in your body that control your hunger and metabolism.
The foods you eat, often impact these hormones and chemicals, which can cause you to have insane cravings, or little to no cravings at all.
These hormones can also signal to your body when you’re full and when you need more food to survive.
I’ve talked about the main hunger hormones: leptin, ghrelin, insulin, and glucagon in past posts.
Studies show, overweight people, from years of poor nutrition, may have created imbalances with these hunger hormones, which has led to increased hunger, decreased metabolism, and potential insulin resistance.
If this is you, don’t worry.
By following these healthy lifestyle tips, you will reduce hunger cravings, you will lose weight and burn body fat, and decrease your insulin resistance by improving your insulin sensitivity.
10 best tips on how to reduce hunger cravings for weight loss
#1. Stop skipping meals
When you go too long between meals, or you starve yourself all day to hit an extreme calorie deficit, your hunger cravings will eventually catch up with you.
This happens to me if I go to the office, without eating a good meal before.
I’ll work for 5-6 hours without any food, then I’ll come home starving, and turn into the cookie monster.
This is easily avoided by simply planning out your day better, and prepping your food in advance, so you always have access to good meals and snacks, before your blood sugar levels plummet.
#2. Eat more healthy fat
Foods high in healthy fat are not only super important for every cell in your body, including your brain which is 60% fat, they are also very filling.
One of the best sources of healthy fat are foods high in omega 3 fatty acids, like wild salmon.
However, if the thought of eating a lot of fish doesn’t sound appetizing, supplement with a high quality fish oil supplement and or krill oil.
In addition to being great for brain and heart health, both fish oil and krill oil have been shown to help reduce hunger cravings, which helps with weight loss, as well as potentially improving your metabolism.
Fish oil is one of the few supplements I take every single day.
#3. Eat more protein
Protein has many benefits, but when it comes to hunger, high protein foods are very satiating, meaning they fill you up.
Protein is also very thermogenic, which simply means, in order for the body to break the protein down, it burns a lot of calories.
Even though a 4oz chicken breast may contain 190 calories, the body may burn approximately 30% of those calories, just by digesting it.
The best foods high in protein include, grass fed beef, whole eggs, chicken breast, turkey, wild fish, and protein powder.
#4. Eat less processed and refined carbohydrates
Processed and refined carbohydrates like bread, cereal, cookies, pasta, and potato chips are calorie dense foods, meaning they contain a lot of calories for a small amount of food.
However, rather than filling you up, they actually further increase your hunger cravings, causing you to eat more.
I call these trigger foods, where eating just a small amount doesn’t fulfill you, as you keep craving more.
This is based on the negative impact they have on your blood sugar and insulin.
When you eat them, they quickly spike your blood sugar, a rush of insulin is then produced to remove the excess sugar from the bloodstream, then your blood sugar quickly drops, and your body craves more sugar.
It’s a continuous roller coasting of hunger spiking activity.
#5. But don’t stop eating all carbohydrates
Even though higher protein and lower carbohydrates is a great way to reduce hunger cravings, lower carbohydrates does not mean zero carbohydrates.
Aim for complex carbohydrates that are high in fiber.
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In order to optimize your hunger hormone, leptin, and maintain a healthy metabolism, your body does want a moderate amount of carbohydrates either daily or via carb cycling.
#6. Your first meal of the day should be a high protein, high fat, and low carbohydrate meal
I call these my PFF meals.
Protein, fat and fiber.
This will help you stabilize your blood sugar throughout the day, which will help reduce cravings.
Also starting your day with a healthy meal, sets the stage for a healthy day.
#7. Avoid stress eating
When we are stressed, our cortisol hormone quickly rises, which can lead to body fat storage.
Once the body is stressed, it often craves processed and refined carbohydrates, as insulin helps reduce cortisol production.
Rather than eating away at your stress, work away at your stress.
Go for a workout, or simply get outside and go for a walk.
As the stress lowers, your hunger cravings will also lower.
#8. Get your body moving
Resistance training and HIIT workouts are a great way to increase calorie burn, build calorie crushing muscle, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce stress eating, and make you feel great about yourself.
When you put in the work with your workouts, it’ll make you think twice about stuffing your face with crappy food.
#9. Stop being bored
A lot of the time you think you’re having hunger cravings, you’re not.
You’re just bored in front of the TV.
A busy person doesn’t get hunger cravings as much as someone who is just bored.
Again, go for a walk, get in a workout, read a book, go volunteer at the dog shelter, get a second job, or finally pursue that passion you’ve always wanted to turn into a career.
I did it, you can too.
#10. Have a mantra
When you feel a hunger craving coming on, have a go to re-affirming mantra.
For example:
“Eat like your goals depend on it.”
“Is this ______ food taking me closer to my goals or further away.”
“5 minutes after eating this, will I feel satisfied and happy with myself?”
Bottom line on reducing hunger cravings
To this day, both Jessica and I still have the occasional hunger cravings.
But when we do have them, we know exactly why.
Our hunger cravings happened, because we didn’t follow these tips.
And it’s not about being 100% perfect, all the time. Focus on progress not perfection.
You’ll still have hunger cravings in your life, but you can manage them and have less of them.
Based on the positive results of our Live Lean client success stories, we know these tips will also help you lose weight and reduce your hunger cravings.
If you’re looking for the best workout and nutrition program to help you reduce your hunger cravings, go take our free Live Lean Body Quiz.
When you join one of our programs, you’ll receive a 42 day workout program and nutrition plan based on your goals, as well as access to our private Facebook accountability group.
Weight loss is not just about losing weight on the scale
Here at Live Lean TV, we don’t treat weight loss as just losing weight on the scale.
This approach often leads to starvation diets, excessive cardio, and becoming a skinnier and weaker version of yourself, with a ruined metabolism.
Good luck sustaining that approach with your nutrition and workouts.
All of our Live Lean success stories have accomplished this by following our step-by-step programs that combine:
- properly structured resistance training workouts
- quick and strategic cardio sessions
- sufficient sleep and recovery
- a proper mindset
- consistent eating habits that fuel the body, not deprive it
We have so many people getting incredible results and we want you to become our next Live Lean success story.
Thanks for watching and keep Living Lean.
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Brad Gouthro is the founder of Live Lean TV, a media company focused on helping men and women “Live Lean” 365 days a year. Brad’s programs and content have helped millions of people all over the world learn how to get in shape, and more importantly, sustain it for life.
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