More Healthy Eating Tips

Eat your calories! This is an important one. Don't skip meals. When you eat too few calories per day, your body goes into starvation mode and hangs onto every calorie that you do eat, which can make it even harder to lose weight. I use MyFitnessPal to calculate how many calories I should eat to maintain or lose weight and to track what I have eaten (they have a HUGE food database!).

Cut the cheese. Haha :P. Seriously though, cheese has a ton of calories compared to the small amount you get to eat (think 100+ calories per ounce) so I'm being a lot more stingy with the cheese, and looking for lower-fat options. And fat-free cheese? I'm sure some people like it or will at least eat it, but to me, it looks and tastes like plastic, so I'd rather have no cheese at all.

Have a drink. Drinking a glass of water before a meal helps me not eat as much during that meal. Plus, being thirsty can also be mistaken as hunger so you may eat a sandwich when what you really need is a drink.

Snack. I do better throughout the day when I have a small snack in between the three big meals. Eating those snacks in between makes it so I'm not starving by dinnertime and I don't inhale twice as much as I would have if I had just a little something in my stomach.

Get a food scale. I think it makes our lives a lot easier. I like that I KNOW that I'm eating only as much as a recipe calls for so I'm not eating "accidental" calories. I even weighed out glasses of milk the first few times -- good thing, too, because at first, what I would have guessed was 8 ounces was actually 12! (and that made a noticeable calorie difference). And sometimes I get to eat more than I thought -- when we weighed the chicken for the pizza, I was surprised at how much 3 ounces of chicken actually was!

SOME EASY, HEALTHY SUBSTITUTIONS:
Sorry, but I can't look at an article that says "eat carrot sticks instead of potato chips for a snack!" and think those two things are equal. These are some painless substitutions we've found so far.

Use "sandwich thins" instead of regular bread. Home Pride white bread is 70 calories per slice. Oroweat Sandwich Thins are 100 calories for TWO slices. For someone like Chris who eats 2 sandwiches for lunch, that saves 80 calories on the bread alone, and he loves them!

Drink Crystal Light instead of juice. For someone who can only take so much "plain" water, I love Crystal Light. It's the only product made with artificial sweeteners that I use so I'm not too concerned about that aspect of it (and the Pure Fitness flavors do not use aspartame at all), and at only 5 calories per serving, I'm not drinking a lot of extra calories. The fruit punch flavor tastes exactly like Kool-Aid, but my favorite is the Strawberry-Orange-Banana.