3 Tricks to Suppress Your Appetite

A good arti­cle appeared in the fit­ness sec­tion of MSNBC on the other day. Since you’re busy, I’ll do a quick sum­mary of the arti­cle — the good stuff, the bad stuff, and what you need to do today to get started.

First, you need to know this. And this will prob­a­bly shock you. Rarely, if EVER, do you need to sup­press your appetite!

The real secret is to increase your metab­o­lism, the rate at which your body uses food for fuel.

Then being hun­gry is a good thing as long as you’re eat­ing the right foods at the right time.

Jon Benson’s Favorite Foods plan is a great way to do this.

But let’s say you want to curb your appetite at night, that’s the time most peo­ple really lose it on a diet plan. Even on a plan that ASKS you to eat fre­quently like mine, there are times where night-time crav­ings need to be put to sleep.

So use these tips from the arti­cle to ease the urge to eat at night:

1. Pro­tein First

As Jon stresses in his diet­plan, “Rise and shine with pro­tein.” But what does this have to do with night-time cravings?

Every­thing.

Set the body up to use your own fat-stores for fuel by eat­ing pro­tein in the morn­ing and your appetite FOR fatty foods goes way down dur­ing the day and the night. Pro­tein is “ther­mo­genic”, mean­ing it helps increase your metab­o­lism. It also acts as a nat­ural appetite regulator.

Notice I said “reg­u­la­tor” and not “sup­pres­sant.” That’s because you only need to reg­u­late your appetite, no mat­ter how much body­fat you desire to drop.

Cool, right?

2. Go For The Grapefruit

In a study at the Nutri­tion and Meta­bolic Research Cen­ter at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, peo­ple who ate half a grape­fruit with each meal lost an aver­age of 3.6 pounds in three months. That doesn’t sound like a lot (and it isn’t) but that’s ALL they changed.

It doesn’t mat­ter for our pur­poses, we want to lower insulin at night. Why? Insulin is not only dan­ger­ous for your health in excess but it also can cause a LOT of fat stor­age if secreted too much at night.

Enter the lowly grape­fruit. A great snack, espe­cially if you have a few bites of lean pro­tein with it.

3. Smell This!

This is a trick I didn’t know about until recently.

Smelling food can trick your brain into think­ing you’ve eaten.

A recent study found that those who inhaled pep­per­mint in scent form every 2 hours at (get this) 2700 calo­ries LESS per week than they nor­mally did.

Let me put that in per­spec­tive: That’s a fat­loss of more than half a pound a week from sniff­ing peppermint!

Vanilla also works. You can keep vanilla-scented drops or even can­dles around the office and take a wiff every few hours.

How easy is that?

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The Bad Part
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The MSNBC arti­cle goes on with advice like “eat pota­toes” and “eat just a lit­tle bit of fat”, both of which are nonsense.

Pota­toes may fill you up, but they are still starch — and starch should be con­sumed on your “off” days.

Pota­toes are espe­cially bad due to the higher-than-desired glycemic index of 85 (any­thing over 50 is too high.)

You also need dietary fat and not just “a lit­tle.” You need a mod­er­ate amount to stay healthy and keep insulin regulated.

Olive oil and even coconut oil are excel­lent sources, as are nat­u­rally occur­ring fats in fresh fish, grass-fed beef, farm-raised chicken and whole eggs.

The rest of the arti­cle is com­mon sense stuff: Work­out, eat dense food that requires you to chew a lot (tire out the jaw mus­cles and you nat­u­rally eat less), etc.

The top 3 are the real winners.