When you make little tweaks and adjustments to your daily diet, you can reap major benefits in terms of weight loss, and one way to ensure that happens is by shaving off extra calories from your meals and snacks to enter into calorie deficit, burn fat, and shed pounds that make you uncomfortable. In this post, we list down 17 easy ways to shave off calories from your meals for successful weight loss.

1. Plain Yogurt instead of Greek Yogurt: We often consider flavoured Greek yogurt healthy and a weight-loss friendly food, but that’s not true. Fruity and sweet Greek yogurt that claim to have the richness of fruits have added sugar and preservatives in them, and quite a lot of extra calories. By switching to plain Greek yogurt, you can get lean protein with up to 15 gm of protein and also a good dose of probiotics, minus extra calories.

2. Make your own Salad Dressings: Though salads are extremely healthy, we unknowingly add a lot of calories by mixing up sauces, vinaigrettes, and other condiments that take up the calorie count by a great degree. Keep salad healthy by skipping all the above mentioned toppings and keep it low calorie with vegetables and sprinkling up with healthy nuts for that essential omega-3 fatty acids. Also, store-bought salad dressings have added sugar, sodium, and other preservatives and it’s best to stay away from them.

3. Eat Fresh Fruits instead of Making Juices: Even though a lot of fruit juices claim to be 100% real, nothing can replace whole fruit with high fiber content. Even when you juice out fruits, the fiber content is lost and most of the calories come from the natural sugar in fruits, whic spike up insulin. Instead of juicing out fruits or picking up packaged juices, eat your fruits raw and get the benefits of antioxidants, vitamins, fiber, and minerals.

4. Skip Mayonnaise in Sandwiches: Mayonnaise increases the flavour of sandwiches by a great degree, but  mayonnaise is made by adding loads of oil and is extremely high in calories. Also, mayonnaise is extremely delicious and it’s hard to stop at just one teaspoon, and that’s why skipping mayonnaise will help you cut a lot of calories. You can use avocado, hummus, almond butter and even Greek yogurt instead for that bit of creaminess.
5. Start on Rati Beauty Weight Loss Diet: You can cut a whole load of calories without compromising on nutrition or health, and that’s why one can rely on weight loss diets such as on the Rati Beauty app where you can cut down calories and lose weight successfully without crash dieting.
6. Don’t add Creamer to Coffee: Adding creamer to coffee makes it yummy, but then it can increase up the calories by up to 50 calories, so switching to unsweetened almond milk would keep it natural and the coffee creamy, it would provide a good dose of healthy fats as well that would help boost weight loss too.

7. Order a Smaller Size of Everything: To practice portion control and cut unnecessary calories, order medium or small size of everything while eating out.
8. Say no to Thick Crust, Say Yes to Thin Crust Pizza: Opting for a thin crust pizza would mean that you are cutting out the extra calories (less of refined flour, less salt), and more toppings.
9. Pick Healthier Cheese Options: Instead of the regular mozzarella cheese, look for goat cheese or feta, which are comparatively healthier options and taste just as awesome in cheese-based dishes.
10. Avoid Distractions when Eating: You can eat a whole lot of calories when you are watching tv or scrolling on phone, so eat your meals in peace so that you can keep a tabs on amount of calories consumed.
11. Oil Spritzer/Cooking Oil Spray: We have unhealthy cooking oils and also healthier ones, but while trying to lose weight, it’s important to show restraint with healthy cooking oils too (olive, avocado, coconut) because a tablespoon can add up to 120 calories. Use an oil spritzer or cooking oil spray to have a control on the quantity of oil.
12. Water Preloading: Water preloading is a healthy and almost effortless way to aid weight loss. In this strategy, experts recommend to consume 500 ml of plain water half an hour before each meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Such a quantity of water before the meal will significantly stretch your tummy and as a result, there would be lesser release of the hunger hormone “ghrelin.” This means you would feel full with less food and fewer calorie intake. It is an effective strategy to tackle overeating. It’s a fact that most of us do not consume enough water through the day, and most of the times, we are just thirsty and not really hungry. Frequent hunger pangs are most probably caused due to dehydration and if you can provide your body with more H2O, you can lose weight rather effectively. Here’s how you can practice “Water Preloading.”
13. Make Vegetable Noodles: Now, make noodles out of your favorite vegetables and get loads of nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals from vegetables such as zucchini, sweet potatoes, and even beetroots. When you swap empty calories from store-bought noodles with nutrient-rich vegetable noodles, you have already cut a lot of calories.
14. Quit the Clean Plate Club: The clean plate syndrome is to consume all that food that’s there on the plate despite being full and stuffed. As kids, we were instructed to finish all the food that was served on the plate, but after becoming adults, the guilt of throwing away food eats into our moral conscience. We also often underestimate the calories present in the last few bites and continue overeating in order to finish all that’s there on the plate. When you quit the clean plate syndrome, you can shave off a whole load of calories.  Here are 9 Techniques to Quit the Clean Plate Club to cut extra calories.
15. Healthy Food Needs Portion Control Too: Avocado, almonds, broccoli, etc., are not doubt healthy, but they still contain calories, and when you do not show portion control around these foods, they can make you gain weight. So, do practice portion control with healthy foods as well.
16. Cut out Sauce and Jam Toppings: Jams and jellies are notoriously fattening and that is because they contain really high amounts of sugar. Sauce also has a lot of calorie-rich ingredients, sugar, and sodium. Such unhealthy toppings will rapidly spike up insulin levels and insulin will lead to storage of fat if excess calories running in the system. When trying to lose weight, do stay away from jam and sauces.

17. Never Substitute Margarine for Butter: There’s a misconception that margarine is healthier than butter, but it’s not at all a better option because it’s made from vegetable oils, salt, and emulsifiers. Stick to regular unsalted butter instead.

Hope these tips would help cut off a lot of calories and lose weight in the process.

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