Never Go Hungry: The Real Secret to Healthy Weight Loss

Watching your weight? If “calories-in, calories-out” is your mantra, try changing up your food routine and start repeating the real secret to maintaining a healthy weight: Eat more.

Truth is, you gotta snack in order to feel full.

According to Skinny Cook Allison Fishman, “Eat more!” is the best advice you can get when it comes to weight loss. Why? Because we’re usually packing on pounds not because our breakfast is too big, but because we overeat after 5:00.

If you’re snacking on anything that fits effectively into your mouth when the clock strikes the dinner hour, it’s probably because you didn’t get an adequate amount of calories during the day.

Fishman recommends adding a do-not-miss mid-afternoon snack to your day – 200 calories or so – and if you need it, one mid-morning as well. The key is eliminating blood sugar crashes, providing yourself with consistent energy, and not inhaling food after five out of pure starvation.

Eating small portions throughout the day also helps increase metabolism, keeps the brain out of the late-day fog, and helps us avoid temptation for things we would ordinarily shun (think donuts in the snack room) if we were properly fed.

So start a brand new weight loss mantra: Never go hungry. You may see the pounds start to fall off. Plus, you won’t be distracted by that annoying rumbling sound anymore.

6 Tips for Vigorous Snacking for the Skinny-to-be:

1. Get a serving. Maybe it’s a fruit or veggie serving, maybe it’s a healthy fish serving. Either way, snacking is a ready-made way to fill the gaps in your nutrition. Fishman keeps crisp bread with smoked salmon and herbs around for a mini gourmet snack that replaces a bulky bagel – under and buck and 45 calories.

2. Eat brain food. If you’re having a snack, choose one that’s good for your brain. Berries, for example, improve blood flow and keep small blood vessels working efficiently, allowing for better brain health and performance. Studies show that rats that eat blueberries get through their mazes quicker and have a higher level of regenerating cells in their brains – just what we need to combat mid-day human slumps.

3. Pack your own. Buying those 100 calorie snacks that come in mini packages is a sure way to hike up your food bill. Forget the packages: make you own by cutting fresh veggies, bringing yogurt or packaging your own leftovers in your own moderate size bag, box or wrap. Keeping full throughout the day requires some planning ahead, so do the 3-step snack shuffle – shop, prepare, and package – every day.

4. Combine it. Combining foods that work well together can make your snack life more interesting and more satisfying. Carrots and hummus or apples and a cheese wedge or teaspoon of peanut butter can keep you from chewing bare celery all day and feeling deprived as a result. Having herbs at the ready (dill, basil, cilantro), using citrus (a squeeze of lemon or lime on salads, fruits and proteins), and sprinkling coarse salt on your homemade snacks can rev up your taste buds and turn boring into gourmet.

5. Get creative. Step away from the bird seed, and get yourself an eating well handbook to enrich your meal planning ideas and jazz up your snacking. In You Can Trust a Skinny Cook, Allison Fishman offers up yummy Parmesan Twists for 97 calories per serving, and fabulous Stuffed Mushrooms for 107. Check out her “Something to Munch” section for tons of easy recipes that turn deprivation into a thing of the past.

6. Check your portions. It’s an equation that works: eating during the day means cutting portions at the end of the day. And whether it’s a mid-day snack or dinner blow out, you may not have to eat as much as you currently are. Gimmicks like smaller plates, putting you main course on your salad plate (and your salad on your entrée plate) or immediately cutting your meal in half and saving it for tomorrow’s lunch can provide the crutch you need to understand what your stomach really needs…and what it doesn’t so much. Life, like lunch, is long…you can always eat later.

Get the last word on snacking from the Mayo Clinic’s How Snacks Fit Into Your Diet Plan.

Try these 30 Healthy Snacks from Self magazine.

You Can Trust Allison Fishman

The “Skinny” Cook Finds the Recipe for Healthy, Shameless Eating 

The author of You Can Trust a Skinny Cook talked exclusively to Wild About Health about the myth of the microwave, how to maximize servings, and why wild blueberries make her happy.

Allison Fishman admits she kind of loves the fruit and vegetable serving requirements. When she’s away from home working, she leaves those picking up fast food sandwiches to their own devices, and insists on yogurt and berries instead. Recently, while working on a shoot at the Cooking Light offices where she is a contributor, Fishman was delighted to discover the cafeteria stocked with yogurt parfaits with a layer of blueberries. “It’s kind of fun on the road when you can get those things,” she says. “If my goal is to have those six to nine servings, then OK, bacon, you’re going to have to wait.”

You have to trust someone who has that sort of commitment. And about the rest of the servings? No problem. One of her recent on-the-road meals at a Alabama steakhouse started with a celery and carrot appetizer with dressing (one to two servings) followed by a salad (another serving or two), roasted cauliflower (serving), and creamed spinach (serving). Then, she ate half of her steak. “That’s the way to eat,” she says.

“After a lifetime of trying to diet, suddenly there it was. There was the solution.”

Fishman knows how to eat – even at a steakhouse on the road – from experience. She may be the author of You Can Trust a Skinny Cook, but she doesn’t consider herself skinny. “I’m not a naturally skinny person. I don’t come from skinny people. I’m 5’6″, 135 pounds. I’m curvy, and that’s they way it’s going to be,” she says. But she has been bigger. After working a corporate job for ten years, she had been eating out and traveling a lot, and she had gained a lot of weight.

“I was going out to Boston and Manhattan and having wonderful meals and then cooking at home and having bad food. I was microwaving frozen diet dinners or having diet snacks. And I was getting heavier,” Fishman says. “It was this weird, sort of sad space I was in.” When she finally tired of the corporate world, she did something surprising. She went to culinary school – not because she aspired to be a professional chef, but because she wanted to learn how to cook.

“I thought, I can’t be the only woman suffering in the kitchen,” she said of her culinary ineptitude. “There’s an assumption that women are domestic and have these kitchen skills, and quite frankly, they are not things you are born with.” At culinary school, she cooked and ate more than she had in her life, and she shrank. “I remember my sister-in-law saying, ‘We need to go to Nordstrom’s. Your clothes don’t fit’. I realized that I was suddenly learning good cooking techniques, I was cooking vegetables and grains for the first time, and making taste and flavor the priority. Through doing that, I was naturally making better food that was better for me.”

It was a message that resonated. Fishman went on to co-author the bestselling book Cook Yourself Thin, and to serve as the co-host of Lifetime’s Cook Yourself Thin and TLC’s Home Made Simple. You Can Trust a Skinny Cook is her latest book, and it includes recipes and cooking techniques for home cooks who want to eat well and maybe get a little skinnier in the process. Recipes accompany nutritional information as well as a complement of tips for taking in fewer calories without giving up flavor, taste, and satisfaction.

“We are defrosting, we are reheating…we are in a culture of 20 minute meals.”

One of Fishman’s goals is to debunk the notion that eating can be effortless. She says that we tend to buy into a myth that might have been born with the microwave: that if we’re spending time doing something, there must be something wrong with us. “Cooking has gone from something that we have to do to take care of ourselves to something that’s optional,” she says. She likens it to any daily activity like snow shoveling to get the car out in the winter, or showering. “When people brag about not cooking, I think, do people brag about not showering? ‘I don’t shower, showering takes so much time…what a pain!’ But it’s a part of taking care of yourself. And cooking to me is one of those things.”

At the same time, her recipes are by no means difficult. They were tested by novice cooks and chosen based on their ease, as well their very high standards of flavor and quotient of fun. She includes a gazpacho that takes 10 minutes, for example, and an nearly effortless a Creamy Cucumber Soup. But if making a meal takes more than 20 minutes, Fishman says that’s not a bad thing: “I’d rather spend one hour three nights a week and have delicious leftovers.”

It’s no surprise that Fishman included recipes that feature a lot of fruits and vegetables. While she doesn’t care for fruit and veggie “sneaking”, she uses them to both enhance and enlarge servings. “I put them in so you know about it, and you enjoy it,” she emphasizes. She acknowledges that Americans are used to chewing (“and chewing, and chewing”) and her recipes warrant plenty. In fact, many of the inclusions in You Can Trust a Skinny Cook are favorites in lower calorie versions. But calories aren’t diminished through low-cal methods and fake-food substitutions. They disappear through cutting portions – a flourless chocolate cake that could extravagantly serve eight, actually generously serves 12 – or through Fishman’s version of portion “stretching” that actually adds to the flavor.

One tasty example is Fishman’s Spicy Peanut Noodle recipe which incorporates eight cups of Napa cabbage in addition to the noodles. Rather than a skimpy cup of peanut noodles, families can linger over two-cup servings instead, savoring the spicy sauce along with generous amounts of red pepper, jicama, and cabbage. In a recent cooking demo for Wild Blueberry and Peach Bread Pudding, the resulting servings simply heaped with fruit. The only ingredient that could be considered a lower calorie replacement was from a more caloric bread such as a brioche to an Italian bread. She explains, “I’m cutting out the calories that you don’t taste anyway.”

“I want to have the whole fruit – the whole berry.”

“It makes me smile to have them,” Fishman says of using berries as an ingredient in her cooking. “I know I’m doing something good for myself.” Flavor is always the priority for her, and berries are put to delicious work in this regard. Wild blueberries serve a calorie-saving purpose that only enlivens flavor. Her Blueberry Banana Bread uses frozen blueberries as a replacement for chocolate chips, for instance – a decision that turned 600 calories (in a cup of chips) into 60. And when the result is Blueberry Banana Bread, well, that’s a pretty painless sacrifice.

Fishman is also a persuasive proponent of keeping the pantry full – she has to be. She also works as a personal coach helping clients achieve healthier ways of eating. (For Cooking Light she works with a different reader every month to help them adopt a new healthy habit.) They must eat well and eat heartily, so they need easy access to good food.

She considers a stocked freezer a crucial part of a stocked kitchen. She effuses about frozen peas, frozen corn, and frozen wild blueberries. “Your freezer should be full of frozen fruit and frozen vegetables so that when you go to make a meal they are right there,” she says. She avoids “drinking” her calories in health drinks and juices, opting instead for the whole fruit, saying, “I want to have the skin, and I want to have the fiber.”

Having frozen is her ideal method, because, she says, “it’s they best way to get the whole berry.” She also likes the cost savings of frozen, and uses frozen wild blueberries in all of her recipes that call for blueberries, with the rare exception of those used to garnish lemon tarts, where she opts for fresh.

While wild blues have a strong showing in Fishman’s book, it also features fabulously tasty dishes from soup to dessert, including 352 calorie Salmon with Dill Sauce, and a 221 calorie New England Clam Chowder. There’s no stronger evidence that this is a delicious marriage of love for health and love for food. Ready to find your own inner skinny?

Check out Allison Fishman’s You Can Trust A Skinny Cook.