Healthy Hollywood: Fab Food Friday – 5 Easy Weight Loss Tricks!

We cut calories, nix fat from our diet and add lots of greens to our plate and still the scale doesn’t budge. SIGH! Sometimes weight loss isn’t about what we eat – but how we eat!

Healthy Hollywood’s good friend, nutritionist Keri Glassman, dropped by Access Hollywood Live the other day and shared with Billy Bush 5 tricks to taking off the pounds.

Now, Keri shares the skinny secrets with us here at Healthy Hollywood.

1. Cut your food into smaller pieces:
A study found that slicing candies in half caused people to eat less of the snacks, ultimately consuming fewer calories. The research, published in the May issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, found that when candies were cut in half, people snacked on fewer pieces, taking in fewer calories.

2. Pay in cash:
When you’re paying for groceries; paper trumps plastic. Shoppers tend to spend more money on junk-food purchases when paying with a credit or debit card then when using cash, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Paying with cash is more psychologically painful than putting the same amount on a card, dampening the anticipated pleasure of cookies or candy, so you are less likely to toss them into your cart. Leave your cards at home and you’ll save green as well as calories.

3. Go blue:
The colors blue and purple may act as an appetite suppressant. Avoid painting the walls red, yellow, and orange in the kitchen and dining areas because these colors may make us salivate. Instead, keep your color scheme blue. If your walls aren’t blue and repainting is too much, use blue silverware, blue plates, napkins, or place mats. In one study, people who dined in a blue room, ate 33 percent less than those who ate in a yellow or red room. Blue lights make food look less appealing, while warmer colors, especially yellow, have the opposite effect. Fast-food restaurants have known and used this fact for decades, which is why almost all of them have yellowish interiors—they want you to eat more.

4. Keep your spirits up – emotional eating can wreck any diet:
It’s estimated that when people overeat, nearly 75 percent of the time, it’s because they’re feeling blue. Lift your spirits — small doses of pleasant emotions can quickly renew your ability to say no. Try exercising when you’re feeling depressed or meet a friend for coffee; also a little retail therapy never hurt anyone…just don’t go overboard!

5. Keep food out of reach:
Because food is often tied to unhealthy habits – successful diets are about modifying your behavior, whether it be eating different foods … or changing your environment to practice self-control. Challenge yourself – put foods out of reach. Food is often about location, location, location. One study found that putting candy six feet away gave people a chance to think more about if they really are hungry and they avoided the temptation to overeat. If you do something as wacky as eating with a different hand, you may learn self-control and that can test the limits of how bad you want to eat the food. This helps distract you! Picking up a fork with the hand you don’t usually use automatically slows you down and makes you focus on your meal, two things that have been proven to aid weight loss.

Keri Glassman is also a contributing editor at Women’s Health Magazine. Head over to www.womenshealthmag.com for more nutrition/diet tips.