For A Healthy Diet: Watch Your Dinner

You can find tips to lose weight easily everywhere: limiting your calorie intake, eating more protein, eating several small meals throughout the day, not too many carbohydrates or sugars, etc. But there is another way. A way that will certainly ensure that you will gradually lose weight in a healthy way. And this way might surprise you:  Pay close attention to what you eat for dinner.

In this article, we’ll explain how and why improving some dinner habits will help you lose weight.

Why is dinner so important?

The saying, “Breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a prince, and dine like a beggar” tells us how we should distribute our food throughout the day: a big breakfast, a regular lunch, and a meager dinner. In general, as the day goes by, we need less and less energy. Unless we’re very active during the night.

When you eat a smaller dinner or even eat at an earlier time, you will find that you are more hungry the next morning and therefore eat a larger breakfast. At the end of the day, you will have eaten as much as you would if your evening meal was your largest meal. The only difference is that when you have a big breakfast and eat little at dinner, all the food you consume is converted into energy and then burned. This way your body naturally balances your weight – you don’t have to do anything yourself!

What time should we start dinner?

According to Chinese medicine, the liver and gallbladder regenerate themselves between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. These two organs are an essential part of digestion. They can improve or worsen the way our bodies digest food.

So to ensure that we do not disrupt our body’s natural regeneration process and that our digestive system continues to function optimally, we should never eat our dinner later than 8 p.m.

How much should we eat for dinner?

This differs from person to person and often depends on your lifestyle. The most important thing is that you are no longer hungry. This means you won’t feel the need to eat anything later in the evening. Try to train yourself to eat until you are full and then stop. For example, many people continue to eat because their plate is not yet empty, because of stress, because they want to treat themselves to dessert or because they are distracted by something else.

Teaching yourself not to eat when you’re full  will help you stay lean, improve digestion and keep your tummy nice and flat – eating too much can cause bloating .

Choose satiating foods

The easiest way to avoid overeating and not feel like you’re starving yourself is to eat foods that are high in fiber and water. You get full quickly and this type of food is easily digestible.

Large amounts of fiber and water are mainly found in vegetables, but you can also often find them in algae. Wakame seaweed, agar-agar, kombu seaweed, sea asparagus etc. are all foods that belong in a healthy diet . You can add these ingredients to soups or salads and even use some of them to make desserts. Agar-agar is also delicious on its own.

What are some satiating meals we can prepare?

• Baked vegetables (broccoli, carrot, mushrooms, corn and eggs)
• Vegetable soup made with kombu seaweed and oats
• Salad with Brussels sprouts, apples and avocado
• Gazpacho
• Hummus (mashed chickpeas) or guacamole with slices of carrot and cucumber

• Vegetable soup and quinoa
• Spinach with raisins and pine nuts
• Cream of zucchini, wakame seaweed and curry
• Cold salad with peas and chicken
• Sweet agar-agar with apple and cinnamon

What if you are really hungry?

Some people would like to eat smaller evening meals or dine earlier, but are unable to do so due to working late or for other reasons. When they come home late at night, they just want to have their dinner quietly.

We recommend that these people have a small snack about three hours before dinner. That way they can enjoy the dishes we mentioned above without eating too much of it.

This must of course be a healthy snack. Below some examples:

• Fruit or natural juices
• Nuts: walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds etc.
• Dried fruits: dates, plums, apricots etc.
• Wholemeal bread with toppings (cheese, avocado, egg salad, etc.)
• Fresh cheese with quince