Trigger foods are the foods that trigger you to overeat. Some dieters have multiple trigger foods while others may have only one. The usual suspects include candy, cookies, chips, ice cream and doughnuts, but your personal trigger food may very well be a favorite food like mac 'n cheese, subs, hamburgers or pizza.
Being able to identify which foods stimulate your tendency to overeat is the first step to helping you take better control. And with the holidays fast approaching, it's good to have a strategic plan in place to reduce your vulnerability to trigger foods and lessen holiday weight gain.
Here are some tips to guide you:
1. Know your trigger foods. Keeping a food diary will give you more awareness about your trigger-type foods. These are often the salty or sweet snacks that you can't stop eating, despite your level of hunger. Recording your food intake in a food diary will help you reflect on what foods trigger your overeating episodes. As the saying goes, "once you can name them, you'll be able to tame them."
2. Make your home a safe haven. Whether your trigger food is nuts, chips, cookies or ice cream, now is the time to remove the "offender" from your home. It's not to say that you can never eat this food again; it's just that losing weight will be much easier for you if this food is removed from your home. Successful weight losers know they need to make their home a safe haven if they want to experience less struggles at home. If other family members still want those foods around, make a deal with them to keep that food out of sight – and thus out of mind – either on a high shelf or in a container impossible to see through!
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3. Satisfy cravings in healthier ways. A smart dieter knows that deprivation can lead you to quickly abandon your healthy weight loss program. So as not to feel deprived, you need to plan for a healthier way to satisfy your craving for a sweet or salty treat. For example, if ice cream is your downfall, allow yourself to enjoy a light ice cream or yogurt cone in an ice cream shop. Or if salty chips are your favorite, consider trying the 100-calorie snack pack of baked chips as an addition to your lunchtime meal. The goal is to avoid buying the big bag or box of a trigger food and start learning to enjoy healthier versions in a moderate portion.
4. Add water-based foods. Most trigger foods are energy dense which means they have a lot of calories for their given weight. These high energy-dense foods are often dry foods that lack water. We know that eating water-based foods like soups, fruits, vegetables, whole grain dishes or oatmeal, fill you up faster and make you feel satisfied. If you can consciously pick a snack food that is wet, not dry, you can use this trick to keep your hunger at bay. For example, it may take lots of dry pretzels to fill you up but eating some low-fat yogurt with cut up fruit or a high fiber cereal with nonfat milk should satisfy you more quickly.
I hope these four tips will allow you to disarm your trigger foods so you can control them versus them controlling you. |
