Woman Lost 180 Pounds (Half Her Body Weight) with These 5 Eating Hacks

You can lose weight – one little eating hack at a time. Carla (@HalfofCarla) is a weight loss warrior who lost over half her body weight – a whopping 180 pounds – by making a few key healthy changes. In a new YouTube video, she reveals a few simple eating hacks that were a key part of her success. “Weight loss is hard, and I've lost over half my body weight, so I know, “ she says in the clip. “I've come up with a couple of hacks that helped me to lose 180 pounds, and hopefully, they might help you. If you're new here, my name is Carla. I make videos about how I show up for myself and hope to inspire you to do the same,” she continues. “In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you five different simple hacks that you can do that might help you on your weight loss journey.”

Hack 1: Plate (Or Bowl) Everything

“Number one. We have a simple rule in this household that everything that you eat must be on a plate,” she says in the post. “The reason is, what happens when we want something to eat is that we often get triggered by the idea, or we're walking around the kitchen and we're like, Hmm, I could do with a little bit of something. You know, I'm, I'm a bit peckish. And before you know it, you've grabbed the entire bag of granola, you've eaten half of it, and you're still looking for something to eat even though you've just eaten all of this. Basically, what's happening is that our mind is not catching up with the fact that we're eating something. We're not present in what we're doing. So in order to do that, to put a delay between that, just scoffing it into our mouth and realizing that we're eating something, we're going to put it on a plate or on a bowl.”

And, Sit and Eat with Utensils

“Making sure that it is on either a bowl or a plate is going to stop you from just automatically reaching and eating all of this, measuring it out, weighing it out, and putting that delay in. So your mind is becoming more present and becoming more aware that you are about to eat something, and then you're going to eat it,” she says. A hack that goes along with this? “You got to sit the fork down to eat your food. No standing around in the kitchen, scoffing piles of granola, into your mouth. It's against all the rules. I'm standing, and it's not on a plate,” she says.

Hack 2: Proportion Your Snacks

Her second hack is to start proportioning your snacks. “If we think that we are not able to eat any kind of sweet or sugary thing or anything nice while we're losing weight, we're probably going to feel really deprived. And that's not what we want to do here. We want to ensure that we can deal with it and work within our lifestyle. So we're creating new habits that allow us to maintain that weight when we get into maintenance. Because if we deprive ourselves for however long it's going to take us to lose weight and say, you cannot have that chocolate bar until you finish weight, until you finish losing weight,” she says. Once you use it, you will overindulge.

You Can Even Do This with Candy

Instead, you want to find ways to make weight loss sustainable, and proportioning can help. For example, put Halloween candy into little bags and know exactly how many calories are in each bag. “Then, when you are planning your meal, which is important for your week, you can leave 160 calories worth of room for your snacks. You can put it on here, label it, and then put them away,” she says.

Hack 3: 20 Minute Snacking Rule

“Number three in a similar vein is to do with snacking,” she says, noting that it was a “game changer” for her weight loss. “This is the thing that helped me to still feel satisfied, but stopped any kind of binge overeating tendencies that I might have had.”

It Will Help You Avoid Binging

“Can I do the 20-minute rule? Can I wait 20 minutes now and see how I feel after this? Give it 20 minutes. See how you feel. It's a lot easier to do that than just to keep dipping your hand into the big all bag, especially if it's something that's like triggery,” she says.

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Hack 4: Do Not Eat Sweets on an Empty Station

Number four, then is not so much a hack. It is a piece of life advice that I have learned in the last five years of losing weight and maintaining weight: Guys, do not eat sweets on an empty stomach. Don't eat sweets on an empty stomach,” she says.

Smart Ways to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth

While you can eat sweets, “please don't let that be the thing that you reach for when you are hungry, because if you do that, your body will spike your blood sugar, and then all you're going to want is to, you're going to crave sugar,” she says. “If you want to eat something sweet, make sure that you have it either after your dinner or after you've had a meal or worst case scenario, have at least a piece of fruit, like a banana or something like that, and then have the chocolate bar have the packet of, of the chocolate, the sweets, whatever it is, the jellies, whatever it is for you.”

Hack 5: Have Snacks for When You Are Cooking

“The last little one is something I'm particularly proud of. It's something that helped me a lot during weight loss and made life so much easier for myself. That is to cut up and to have a snack that is dedicated to snacking while cooking,” she says. She points out that when making meals, while you are hungry, you are likely to grab unhealthy food and snacks.

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Veggies Are Great for This

“What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a wee pepper, something like a pepper, a cucumber, cherry tomatoes, an orange, something like that, some fruit or vegetable that I'm going to cut up first. So the very first thing I'm going to do, and then I'm going to put it on my plate, and when I make my soup, I'm going to have that, and that is going to be my snack while I'm preparing my food,” she says. That way, she will avoid grabbing granola, bread, or another not-as-healthy option. And if you enjoyed this article, take advantage of these 15 Quick Ways to Lose Body Fat Percentage in a Week.