Health Nut Q&A: Healthy Foods and Tips to Help Weight Loss
Our Health Nut and Registered Dietitian, Molly Morgan, answers our customers’ most pressing health and nutrition questions!
If you’d like Molly to answer one of your questions in a future blog post, please email your question to health@nuts.com. If we feature your question in The Nutty Scoop, we will also send you a pound of your favorite Nuts.com product.
I want to lose weight. Can you give me some tips on Nuts.com products that might help me do this? Thank you! – Joyce
Losing weight is a balancing act! It’s all about creating a negative calorie balance to move the scale in the downward direction. How can you achieve this? By taking in fewer calories from food than your body needs each day or burning extra calories through exercise. A mix of calorie reduction and calorie burning with exercise is ideal for successful long-term weight loss.
When reducing your food intake there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. Fiber helps to fill you up!
Having the right mix of foods can keep you satisfied even as you consume fewer calories. Fiber moves food through your system at a slower rate, which will keep you full longer. Plus, since food moves through more slowly, eating high-fiber foods will help you to maximize nutrient absorption.
Here are a few fiber-rich foods from Nuts.com to add to your weight-loss routine:
- Freeze Dried Strawberries: Have only 31 calories per serving and 3 grams of fiber
- Chia Seeds: One ounce has 11 grams of fiber. Chia seeds are hydrophilic, meaning they retain water. In fact, chia seeds can hold about 10 times their weight in water, which means they will really fill you up. If you’re not sure what to do with your chia, try my Chia Seed Pudding Recipe.
- Whole Grains: When the whole grain is intact, it has more fiber and more nutrients. At meals, serve up whole grains such as buckwheat, millet, quinoa, brown rice or amaranth. All of these grains offer more belly-filling fiber than their non-whole-grain counterparts.
2. Include belly slimming fat!
Monounsaturated fats have been linked to helping improve healthy (HDL) cholesterol levels, lowering bad (LDL) cholesterol levels and slimming fat around the middle (which can be a problem area for many people). Incorporate a serving of monounsaturated rich foods each day to help control or lose belly fat. Take a look at the list of nuts below that are highest in monounsaturated fat content and check out Nutty Nutrition Nuggets about Nuts for more details on how many nuts are in a single serving!
Grams of Monounsaturated Fat
(per one ounce portion)
- Macadamia Nuts = 17 grams
- Hazelnuts = 13 grams
- Pecans = 11.5 grams
- Almonds = 10 grams
- Brazil Nuts = 7 grams
- Peanuts = 7 grams
- Pistachios = 7 grams
Other food sources that are loaded with monounsaturated fats include: avocado, pumpkin seeds, peanut butter and extra virgin olive oil.
3. Portion control is a must!
Even when eating healthy foods, you must still consider your portion size. When you look at the
nutritional facts of a food, you might notice that a package is double or triple (if not more!) the amount of a single portion. This, in turn, means the calories (and all of the other nutritional facts that are listed) are double or triple what you should be eating.
Try these portion size techniques to take portion control into your own hands:
- Snack out of a bowl, not the bag: One small handful equals about one ounce of nuts. Place a small handful of nuts in a serving dish and snack out of the bowl. This allows you to know how much you ate!
- Stretch the portion: Mix 1 cup of air popped popcorn with a handful of nuts to help stretch the portion size. One cup of air-popped popcorn has only 31 calories.
- Serve up a portion: For parties instead of a bowl of nuts, place small amounts of nuts in mini serving dishes on a tray to help you and your guests keep portions in check.
- Nuts in a shell: Try eating nuts in a shell to slow down the rate you snack. Cracking peanuts, pistachios or other nuts takes much longer than snacking on a handful of already shelled nuts.
And, last but not least, believe in yourself! Having the confidence that you can be successful in your weight loss is essential. I wish you success in achieving your weight loss goals!
Leave a Reply