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Why your eating habits are so important

You have read in the last chapter that there are many reasons why you are always putting fat on your stomach. These reasons all play together, but they differ in two important points: On the one hand, to the extent to which you can influence them and, on the other hand, to the effect a change has on your character.

In both points the eating habits cut off best: The easiest way to change them is because you have plenty of opportunities to do so every day. You can start at any time (best now!) and it does not cost you any additional money.

At the same time, it is the easiest way to control your energy balance. One serving of fries has as many calories as you burn in an hour of aerobics. The arithmetic task is quite simple. What is simpler: to work hard for an hour or eat a piece of fruit or vegetables instead of French fries?

So you see: If you change your eating habits, you are already on the best way to the dream figure without belly fat. You can find out how simple the whole thing is in the following chapters.

Never leave the house without breakfast

You've probably heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It's not a truism, it's true and it can help you get rid of your belly fat permanently.

If you have a healthy breakfast in the morning, you are well prepared for the day. You're not immediately hungry when you come to school or the office and you don't think about eating when you have a little stress. Your body is perfectly equipped to survive the day. Besides, your body knows immediately: There is enough to eat today! And your metabolism adjusts accordingly. So a healthy breakfast is what gets him going.

In addition, with your breakfast you already set a sign for yourself for the nutrition on the whole day. If you have a good breakfast, you will automatically make sure that you eat healthier and more balanced for the rest of the day. The perfect breakfast is balanced and fills you up for a long time. It has a lot of fibre (more about that later), vitamins and little sugar.

Good options are:

- Wholemeal bread with hummus and avocado

- Oat flakes with fruits and low-fat milk (for example also as porridge)

- Wholemeal muesli with banana and orange juice

- Low fat yoghurt with muesli and fruits

If you are not a breakfast friend at all - for example, because your family never had breakfast - you can slowly approach a regular breakfast by drinking regularly in the morning. No, not coffee, but a delicious green smoothie. It provides you with all the nutrients you need, has the same energy as a meal, fills you up for a long time, is quick to prepare and also tastes very good.

In many big cities green smoothies are now sold in all kinds of shops, so you can easily get one on your way to work. Even better, of course, is if you make it yourself. All you need is a blender and fresh fruit and vegetables. There are no limits to your imagination. As a rule of thumb, you can take twice as much fruit as vegetables so that the whole thing doesn't get too bitter. If the result is too countable, you can add more water.

A beginner smoothie, for example, consists of half a cucumber, a handful of spinach leaves, half an apple, the juice of an orange, a banana and some water. This will also help you to leave the house well strengthened and programmed for a healthy diet.

Five small meals a day

Most of us have learned at home that you eat three times a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. In fact, we eat every six or seven times a day because the time between meals is so long that we bridge it with snacks and sweets. The demand for the three meals is more organizational than good for the body. In the mornings and evenings you are at home anyway and can start and end the day with a meal. And at noon you only need a break to eat when the hunger is especially big.

But it is much better for your body if it has the feeling that there is a virtually uninterrupted supply of food. Then he knows that he is always well cared for and that there is no reason at all to build up reserves in the form of abdominal fat. That doesn't mean you have to eat without a break. But if you distribute five meals throughout the day and make them slightly smaller, your metabolism will be busy all day long. And so you don't gain any weight in the first place.

The important thing, of course, is that you don't eat more than you actually need. So don't take the three meals as usual, add two more and continue snacking in between. Instead, it helps you to have breakfast in the morning, to have a second small breakfast in the late morning, to have a balanced lunch, to have a healthy snack in the afternoon and to finish off with a small dinner.

One way in which this could look concretely would be, for example:

- First breakfast at 7 am: Green Smoothie (see chapter on breakfast)

- Second breakfast 10 am: oatmeal with fruits

- Lunch at 13 o'clock: Salad

- Afternoon snack at 4 pm: Yoghurt with walnuts and honey

- Dinner at 7 pm: wholemeal noodles with tomato sauce

You see, with this pattern you eat something every three hours and are therefore never hungry. Your body is permanently supplied with food, but also has no oversupply. So he digests everything directly and does not accumulate fat reserves. And you don't even have to starve!

Avoid sugar

Sugar is one of the most important reasons why so many people in our modern society suffer from obesity. Because sugar has no nutritional value, but a lot of calories. It is particularly easy to convert into fat and that's why sweets taste so good to us, because it used to be a good thing for people to have enough supplies to survive.

In addition, sugar causes the blood sugar level to rise, insulin is released and the body no longer makes use of the fat reserves, but leaves them as they are - or builds them up further. If you eat a lot of sugar and are not a top athlete, you can be sure to get a lot of belly fat quickly.

You should therefore avoid sugar as much as possible. Doctors recommend not to consume more than 25 grams of sugar per day. That may sound a lot, but it's very, very little. Because sugar is in almost everything we eat.

Many finished foods contain a lot of industrial sugar. It is cheap and enhances the taste, and it has no fat - which many buyers pay attention to when buying the additives. So if you don't want sugar, you should rarely go for ready-made foods, but buy them as natural as possible and process them yourself.

It's best to get used to studying the ingredient lists of all the foods you buy. You often don't have to check how much sugar you have, because the ingredients must be listed in such a way that the ingredient that occurs most often comes first. And what does it usually say? That's right, sugar. Or glucose syrup, fructose, maltodextrin or whey products. There are now 70 different names for sugar. You don't have to know them all, but if you don't know the name of an ingredient, there's a good chance you don't want to know what's in it.

If you don't want or can't do without sweets, get as natural a sweetener as possible. Honey is better than sugar because it contains at least vitamins, but too much of it is not good either. Cinnamon and vanilla give a sweet taste and fruit contains a lot of sugar, but at least in combination with vitamins and fibre. Bananas, by the way, consist of 50% sugar. That's why they are so delicious and excellent for replacing sugar in desserts or cakes.

Reduce alcohol

You have changed your eating habits, reduced sugar and are eating much more fruit and vegetables? That's a reason to celebrate, so give me the champagne! But stop, unfortunately, I must slow you down a little here. Because excessive alcohol consumption is not only unhealthy, but also ensures that you gain a lot of belly fat.

One reason for this is that alcohol has a lot of calories. A litre of beer, for example, has 460 calories. That's almost as much as a whole bar of chocolate! If you go out to celebrate in the evening and drink five bottles of beer, you have already brought more than your total daily energy requirement to you. Wine has even more calories because it has more alcohol. The same of course applies to high-percentage products.

But alcohol leads to more belly fat for another reason. Just like sugar, it raises the blood sugar level, leads to cravings and ensures that no fat is burned. If you have drunk enough, you can easily drop your good intentions and eat more unhealthily and uncontrollably. And of course, that's going to be on the scales the next day and on your hips again.

If you enjoy toasting with friends in the evening and don't want to give up alcohol, try to drink something with a low alcohol content. A spritzer of wine has only half the calories left. Also make sure you don't find it too easy to eat unhealthy food, but try to eat healthy things even if you're ravenously hungry.

Many dietary fibres

Dietary fiber is the insider tip when it comes to permanently getting rid of your abdominal fat. Dietary fibre keeps you tired for a long time and doesn't make you fat. Here now all information, which you need to dietary fiber:

What is fibre?

The name "dietary fibre" initially sounds as if the body does not need it. And in fact dietary fibres are such components of food that the body cannot utilize. He excretes them undigested.

But fibre is still not unnecessary. Because they help with digestion and also keep you fed all day long.

There are two types of fibre: Soluble dietary fibres swell in liquid and thus increase their volume. Your stomach stays nice and full and you don't get hungry anymore. Insoluble dietary fibres support digestion by helping to make food more "transportable" and thus channel it through the digestive organs. Both make sure that you don't eat too much and that everything you eat is digested well and doesn't end up as fat on your hips.

Which foods contain the most fibre?

Soluble dietary fibres are present: Cereals, pulses, oat flakes, whole grain rice.

Insoluble dietary fibres are found mainly in the skin of fruit and vegetables. Especially at breakfast it is important that you consume enough fibre. This will keep you full and well prepared for the day.

The later the evening, the more stomach fat

Dinner is the exact opposite of breakfast, not only because it is at the other end of the day. While you lay the foundation for the day with breakfast and should take enough energy to be fit for the day, there is usually no physical activity after dinner. Correspondingly little you should take in the evening.

Just when you're eating late, your body can't digest everything you've given it. The energy is no longer burned, but stored for later times - exactly, in the form of abdominal fat. If you eat a lot and then only watch TV or go to sleep, you tell your body that you don't really need this energy, or at least not immediately.

Another effect of a sumptuous dinner is that the next morning you are all the more hungry. Scientists don't yet agree on why, but you've probably noticed yourself before that you were particularly hungry just after a real feast the next morning. So you start a vicious circle with an extensive dinner, where you start again with cravings in the morning.

To avoid that, you shouldn't eat anything after 8:00. If your dinner starts at 7 p.m., you will have enough time to eat in peace and then burn a large part of the energy. Because of course your dinner shouldn't be a four- course dinner at 7:00 either.

If you are used to eating late in the evening, you can gradually approach an earlier time. The best thing you can do is to move your dinner time one hour forward within a week. That's not even ten minutes a day and your body will hardly notice the change. But for you this means that you burn the energy you consume much better and do not let it go directly into your fat reserves.

Vitamins and minerals

There are so many things you have to pay attention to when eating that hardly anyone has an eye on whether they really consume enough vitamins and minerals. Most of us have some flaw. This becomes even stronger if, for example, you eat a vegetarian or vegan diet or have to do without certain things due to a food allergy.

Vitamins help to keep the body fit and also stimulate digestion. Especially vitamin C, which is found in fresh fruit and vegetables, also supports the connective tissue and helps to look slimmer.

Moreover, if you eat too few vitamins, your body always feels that it is deficient - and it expresses this through hunger. If you just don't have any vitamin-rich food at hand, you automatically reach for unhealthy things. A ravenous appetite, which always leads you to return to old eating habits, can also be caused by vitamin deficiency.

The question of whether one should take vitamins in the form of tablets is a matter of opinion. What is clear is that obtaining vitamins and minerals from food is easier for the body to digest and therefore healthier than adding tablets. Nevertheless, those who are unable to consume sufficient vitamins through food are still better off with tablets. So if you're not sure if you have a vitamin deficiency, it's best to get advice from a pharmacy and take a multivitamin if necessary.

Otherwise, the best remedy for any deficiency is to eat as much fresh fruit and vegetables as possible, and as many different varieties as possible. You'll always be well taken care of. If you don't manage to eat fruit and vegetables, drinking also helps - see the Smoothie tips in the breakfast chapter. With Smoothies you get vitamins, minerals and also fibre, because you always puree the fruits and vegetables with peel. And they make you full and taste delicious, so they are much better than any vitamin tablet.

Not all fats are the same

It used to be "fat makes fat". This is no longer true, because we now know that the body needs fat to live and that fat is sometimes very important. However, there are healthy and unhealthy fats.

Healthy fats are preferably natural, vegetable fats. You can find them in nuts or avocados, for example. They don't make you fat, they even help you get rid of your belly fat. Because fat doesn't make you fat, it makes you full. From a handful of nuts you are just as full as from a portion of French fries - with significantly fewer calories. And they are healthier because they also contain vitamins, minerals and protein.

You should avoid unhealthy fats such as in fatty meat, fried foods or chips. They can mostly be found in foods that are not very healthy anyway, so you can achieve a double positive effect by doing without them.

Drink enough

If you don't drink enough liquid, you may also get fat in your stomach. Because your body can't always tell whether you're hungry or thirsty. If you don't drink enough, you will feel a lack of food and you may even eat out of habit - although you are actually thirsty. Another sure sign that you are not drinking enough is frequent headaches or sore throats.

The best thing to do is to drink at least three litres of water or unsweetened tea every day. Both fill your stomach, give you a feeling of fullness and also give your body the fluid it needs - because water is much more important to your body than food.

If you have trouble drinking regularly, it is best to keep a glass of water on your desk at all times. You can also set your phone to remind you to drink every twenty minutes. And always take a bottle of water with you when you leave the house. With a little habit, you'll soon find it easy to drink enough fluids.