CLEVELAND — Summer will be here before you know it, which also means it’s almost bathing suit season.
If you’re looking to lose some weight, you may be wondering where to begin. Kristin Kirkpatrick, a registered dietitian with Cleveland Clinic, said eating healthy doesn’t have to be complicated.
“Let’s think about limiting our hours in which we’re eating, let’s think about eating more fiber, more plants, less hyper-palatable foods, less processed foods,” Kirkpatrick said. “So that’s kind of a nice high level way to start looking at how we’re going to make some dietary change.”
While Kirkpatrick said you don’t have to give up junk food completely, she says to make sure you’re eating healthy 90 percent of the time. She also advises not to be fooled by fad diets that frequently claim fast weight loss because they aren’t sustainable long term.
Her advice? Here are some tips:
- Intermittent fasting: Only eating during a certain time frame every day, like 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- The Mediterranean diet and DASH diet.
- Don’t set a deadline for your goal weight. Instead, she suggests focusing on physical changes to your body – like fitting into old clothes.
- Think about your hunger level before sitting down to eat.
“Really just kind of listening to our hunger. Am I hungry right now or am I looking to feed emotion? Am I just dehydrated? So really taking the time from a mindfulness perspective of am I feeling true hunger and if I am feeling true hunger, I am going to eat,” Kirkpatrick said. “But I am going to eat until I no longer feel that hunger, which means eating slow, chewing more, taking out distractions and being able to stop before I feel that feeling of fullness.”
Editor's note: Video in the player above was originally published in an unrelated story on March 15, 2022.