I know. It’s hard being satisfied with just 130 calories worth of yogurt for breakfast when you are trying to lose weight by limiting what you eat. You can scarf that darned little plastic container in six regular bites and less than one minute. And then you feel like you have not eating anything at all.
I know how you feel. I used to feel the same way. But let me tell you what I found out. If you shift your paradigm just a little bit and change how you eat what you eat when and where you eat it, you can get sated and stay sated for just 20 calories more.
How?
By following one of my Eat Less CRAPF (the P is silent) basic principles – Life is Great! on a Bed of Greens.
Here’s what I do to get sated and stay sated with 130 calories of yogurt for breakfast.
I take that 130 calories of yogurt, ramp it up by putting it on top of 20 calories of baby spring mix, and party hardy for a good long breakfast, while I write my first blog post of the day.
Try it. Get yourself a single serving container of yogurt with your favorite added flavor (it’s eat less CRAPF, people; not eat no CRAPF) and a five ounce plastic container of mixed baby greens and a plastic fork at the grocery store on the way to work, if that’s where you grab your breakfast. (This beats the heck out of an Egg McMuffin, trust me.)
Now, get to your desk at work, if that’s where you eat your yogurt fix. Open the greens. Pour the sweet, lucious yogurt all over the greens. Mix it up. Take a bite. Chew it just like your momma taught you, 20 chews per mouthful. Log on to your computer. Take a bite while the circle of binary life spins. Chew to the twentieth power. Open your browser. Take a bite. Find something interesting to read or do on the computer. Take a bite. Read it or do it a moment or two. Take a bite. Thirty minutes later, you are going to find that you have eaten 150 calories at the rate of about 5 calories a minute and enjoyed the heck out of it and now you feel sated enough to not eat until your next planned nutritional event.
Update: On the same day I wrote this post and had this for breakfast, I did a different riff on the idea for lunch. I took a single serving pomegranate-flavored greek yogurt and mixed it in a bowl with a red delicious apple that I quickly sliced into a fine julienne with twelve passes over my favorite Borner julienne (http://amzn.to/1IaaG8K, a tool no cook should be without). Then I folded in five ounces of thinly sliced romaine chiffonade. It took me thirty minutes to eat this apple and yogurt salad for lunch and I ran on that for the rest of the day.
[reminder]How would you get sated with just 2 ounces of beef for dinner?[/reminder]