Nutrition Coach Shares 4 Filling “Lazy” Meals Under 500 Calories to Lose Fat

Do you want to lose 50 pounds in three months without having to spend hours at the gym? Nicole Collet is a social media influencer who lost a whopping 130 pounds — and 50 pounds in just three months. On her YouTube channel she shares “easy weight loss tips, small changes & quick, easy meals” that helped her “drop the guilt around food, enjoy the journey & lose the weight for good!” In one of them she reveals the three “Lazy Girl” steps that enabled her and her husband to slim down fast.

This Is Her “Lazy Girl’s Guide to Weight Loss”

“When I was 275 pounds, I wanted to lose weight, but I was really struggling. I didn't really have any self-discipline. I had a really hard time making and sticking to a plan and I knew I needed to find a way to get results without doing a lot of work to get them. So I wanna share my Lazy Girl's Guide to Weight Loss,” she says in the clip.

It Consists of “Three Easy Steps”

“It's three easy steps and it made sticking to what I was doing effortless so that I was able to lose 50 pounds of fat in three months,” she says. She explains that she and her husband, Kyle, lost the same amount of weight and have kept it off for over nine years, in an “efficient” manner. “We've learned you work smarter, not harder. Meaning we like to maximize the results and minimize the amount of effort that you have to put in to get the results.”

1. Focus on Diet — Not Exercise

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“Number one, don't waste too much time on exercise. Diet is the key. I can't tell you how many years and how much time I wasted on thinking that exercise was gonna help me lose weight. The thing is you can out-train a bad diet,” Nicole says.

Make Sure You Are in a Caloric Deficit

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“Getting your diet in check is like 95% of what's gonna get you the weight loss results. You have to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. That's the only rule, meaning you need to consume less calories than you burn. You have to get your diet in check first and then the exercise becomes the cherry on the cake,” she says.

Focus on Portion Size

She explains that she and her husband “didn't change anything that we were eating. Instead we started portioning it out. So for example, we were eating a bag of chips, a family-sized bag of chips every single night for a snack each. Instead of giving up the chips or like changing, we just shared the bag and split it into a bowl,” she says. “So we were automatically eating less calories. We were going in a calorie deficit without changing what we were eating, just eating a bit less. And this is obviously a decent sized portion. So that really helped.”

Read the Label and Use the Suggested Serving Size

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“We both had emotional eating, really bad. Any sort of number counting, number tracking, calorie counting. We couldn't do it. It triggered our emotional eating. So the easiest way to start portioning food was literally on the backs of packages. There's a serving size,” she says. “So we literally started using the backs of packages.

If You Aren’t Losing Weight at the End of the Week, Adjust the Serving Size

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Then they would weigh themselves at the end of the week. “If we lost weight, we knew those serving sizes were good. If we didn't lose weight or we gained weight, we knew to pull back just a little bit because we didn't wanna take away too much because that just caused us to fail in the past.”

Also, Switch From Regular Versions to the Low Cal Alternative

“The other thing that's like a super lazy way to do something, to get in a calorie deficit without even thinking, we literally just switched from what we were eating the regular version to the low cal version. So for example, like I tell the story all the time, I was drinking seven regular cans of Dr. Pepper every single day. That's almost a thousand calories in liquid. But I wasn't ready to give it up and I wasn't ready to eliminate some of the cans. So I literally just switched from regular pop to diet pop. I saved myself almost a thousand calories a day. I still was drinking seven cans of pop but it was diet. So I still got the pop, but I was in a calorie deficit because I was consuming less calories without feeling like I was giving anything up.”

2. Stock Up on No-Cook Food Options

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“Number two, the second step is to always have no-cook food options on hand, like at all times,” she continues. “Always have things in the house that require no cooking at all. Maybe a microwave, but that's it because you're gonna have days where you don't wanna do the meal prep, you don't have time, you are really hungry and you forgot to prep your meal and you need food now or you're gonna go off track. So it's really important to have those things.”

Don’t Waste Time Meal Prepping

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“Kyle and I tried the hours of complicated long meal preps and it really by, you know, after a few months of doing it we were like this is not sustainable. We won't, we don't wanna do this for the rest of our lives,” Nicole continues. “You kind of wanna remove all the excuses that yes you're gonna have to stop your weight loss journey.”

Here Are Some No-Cook Options she Likes

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One no cook option she likes is lean turkey pepperonis from Costco. “They don't taste like turkey at all. She also likes ham slices, cottage cheese, plain Greek yogurt, egg whites, high protein oatmeal, protein ice cream, rotisserie chicken from Costco, Uncle Ben's Bistro Express rice, and low calorie soup.

3. Prioritize Low Calorie, Protein, and Fiber

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“Number three, the third easy step is to prioritize low calorie, protein, and fiber,” she says. “Just by adding protein and fiber into every single meal, they both help you feel fuller, longer. Fiber is slow digesting so it helps you feel fuller, longer. Protein lowers your hunger hormone ghrelin and again helps you feel fuller longer. So by putting that at every meal, you're automatically gonna get fuller, quicker and for longer.”

Make Protein the Base of Your Meal

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“You're gonna be less likely to overeat by making your base some sort of protein. Also, you don't have to put a lot of effort because if you automatically make a meal plan, you put protein in fiber at every meal and you make those your bases like lean protein, rotisserie chicken,” she says.

Drink Protein Milk

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Another easy way to get protein is via protein milk, like Fair Life, “which is 80 calories a cup,” she says. It also has 14 grams of protein “and I believe regular milk if you do like the 2%, it's 130 calories a cup and only like nine grams of protein.”

Add It to Your Cereal

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If you are a cereal eater, “just have a smaller bowl and you don't change the amount of milk, just change the kind, add the protein and the lower calorie milk,” she suggests. “You're gonna feel fuller eating your cereal. You're also gonna be eating less calories because it's a bit of a smaller bowl, a lower calorie milk. You'll be in a calorie deficit eating what you like, not doing any work. You're still eating cereal and milk just a little bit less and a little lower calorie.”

You Can Still Eat Carbs

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She also maintains that you can eat carbs and lose weight if you stay in a deficit. “You can eat anything you want: cereal, pizza, we ate all of that the whole time we were losing weight. It's about how much, not what kind of food you're eating.”

Eat More Fiber to Feel Full

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As for fiber she recommends whole grain toast. “Two slices is 170 calories and six grams of protein. So if you choose the whole grain carbs, you get protein in that too,” she says. “And the fiber in it also helps you feel full.”

Bottom Line: Get Rid of Excuses

The bottom line? “We're trying to get rid of excuses because when you try to change, your brain is gonna give you every excuse in the book to not change and not get the results. But by doing this Lazy Girl's Guide to Weight Loss doing these three easy steps, it's gonna feel effortless,” says Nicole.

This Works Better Than “Taking Food Groups Away,” She Says

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“You're gonna be questioning, am I actually dieting? Like I get to eat what I like. I'm just eating a lower calorie version and I'm losing weight. Like I'm not giving anything up. I'm not feeling deprived. And eating all food groups,” she continues. “We were shocked. We ate a portion of low calorie ice cream and two low cal cookies pretty much every night when we were losing weight in the beginning and we couldn't believe we were getting results eating all the food groups because we'd spent years taking food groups away.”

You Can “Eat What You Like”

“You can eat regular food, you can eat what you like, you don't have to take anything away. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to lose weight and you don't have to spend hours and hours of your time to lose the weight. Make it simple. Follow these three steps. Choose food that you love. Choose food in your budget.”