Fill Up on Soup Before Your Meal
Another idea came to me that’s been out there for a long time about losing weight and using tricks to fill up on low calorie stuff so that you don’t totally go nuts when the main entree comes, and one of those long standing tips to help lose weight or stay on track with your diet when you go out to eat is to order a broth based soup to come before your meal. It has to be broth based though, because the rich and thicker creamy ones are loaded with calories and fat (unfortunately the better soup tastes, the more fat it likely has, it’s that quandry mother nature put on us about fat and how bad it is for us, but how good it tastes).
So for example, if you are choosing between a fancy bisque soup, and a beef broth based vegetable soup, you definitely need to go for the lighter of the two, the broth based veggie soup. The broth will help fill the stomach, because it is hot, and hot liquids make you feel fuller faster, and the saltiness and the veggies will also help you feel fuller so that you don’t fill up on bread or your main entree and eat too much.
A salad before your meal can also help, just make sure it’s not loaded with cheese, croutons and a lot of heavy dressing. Try ordering an oil based dressing, or a light vinagrette and that will help you to curb your hunger and fill you up before you get your main entree so that you can eat less.
The key is to make sure the “meal before the meal” is light and not loaded with fat or carbs. Typically fattening pre-meal foods are bread with butter, creamy soups, deep fried appetizers and other fattening or cream-laden appetizers that just pile on the fat and don’t really do much as far as taking up space in your stomach to make you feel substantially satiated so that you don’t eat as much at your meal.
It’s hard to stick to these rules, especially when you’re starving and are faced with a tempting, steaming basket of hot bread just waiting to be buttered and eaten, but if you can stick to these most of the time when you eat out, it adds up to lots of bonus points for maintaining that sleek physique you want. The foods brought up here today act as a natural appetite suppressant so that you don’t go buckwild on the stuff that adds fat and pounds to your thighs and belly.
