Power up your meals and slim down your body by doing absolutely no additional work. Here’s how
Some people are gluttons for punishment.They’ll take on unbelievably demanding challenges,subject themselves to unbearable agony, just toprove that they can do it. The ultramarathoners.The mountain climbers. And pretty much anyonewho works with 3-year-olds. Being willing toabsorb a daily ritual of torture and to keep pushing through commands a certain degree of respect.But that’s not most of us. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d much rather put our feet up on the cofee table and watch Fallon needle QuestLove than subject our bodies and minds to anything more rigorous than stretching for the remote. Sure, we’ll exercise and watch what we eat if we’ve got a big event coming up, but ticking to a demanding workout or diet for more than a couple of weeks? Not gonna happen. So we gathered up some of the smartest, simplest, and least-demanding ways to lose weight and flatten your belly fast. Read on—if it’s not too much efort.
Some people are gluttons for punishment.They’ll take on unbelievably demanding challenges,subject themselves to unbearable agony, just toprove that they can do it. The ultramarathoners.The mountain climbers. And pretty much anyonewho works with 3-year-olds. Being willing toabsorb a daily ritual of torture and to keep pushing through commands a certain degree of respect.But that’s not most of us. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d much rather put our feet up on the cofee table and watch Fallon needle QuestLove than subject our bodies and minds to anything more rigorous than stretching for the remote. Sure, we’ll exercise and watch what we eat if we’ve got a big event coming up, but ticking to a demanding workout or diet for more than a couple of weeks? Not gonna happen. So we gathered up some of the smartest, simplest, and least-demanding ways to lose weight and flatten your belly fast. Read on—if it’s not too much efort.
1. Toast Your Bread
Bread gets a bad rap as being a source of “empty calories” that spikes your blood sugar and causes your body to store fat. But a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that toasting bread can significantly lower its glycemic index—a measure of how your blood sugar rises in response to a certain food, with foods lower on the glycemic index being less likely to cause spikes associated with weight gain. To make your daily bread even more belly friendly, store
it in the freezer. If you first freeze bread and then toast it, the amount of glucose that your blood absorbs after eating it is half the amount you absorb from fresh bread. The researchers suspect that the starch molecules in the bread take on a diferent structure as a result of freezing, defrosting, and toasting, which means your body has to work harder to break down the sugar.
2. Microwave Your Tea
Tea is the closest thing we currently have to a magic weight-loss elixir. Regularly sipping the beverage, rich in health-promoting compounds called catechins, can fry stubborn belly fat and even fight disease. But if you want to reap the better-body benefits, zap your cuppa in the microwave. After carrying out a series of preparation scenarios in a lab, researchers found that heating a brewed cup of tea in the microwave for one minute before enjoying could increase its catechin availability by
nearly 20 percent. It also slightly boosted the cafeine content!
3. Get Your Burger Drunk
Throwing back a bottle of beer—into a marinade—may eliminate harmful chemicals that form when grilling meat at high temperatures, researchers say. In fact, marinating meat with beer for four hours low-ered levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) by as much as 68 percent in a recent study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. PAHs are classified as endocrine disruptors, meaning they mess with our hormonal systems and can cause weight gain. Interestingly, the darker beers were the most powerful, but even a nonalcoholic variety reduced chemical formation by 25 percent. Previous research showed a red wine marinade to have a similar efect. Researchers say the antioxidant-rich marinades act like a barrier between the meat and cancer-causing compounds.
4. Egg on Your Oatmeal
Study after study airms the weight loss benefits of high-protein breakfasts particularly those that include eggs. With their proven ability to stabilize blood sugar, decrease hunger and reduce post-breakfast snacking more efectively, a protein-packed meal
truly is the best way to start your day. But that shouldn’t limit the menu to omelets. In fact, you can muscle-up your oats (and make them creamier and fluier) by cooking an egg right in with the porridge. Simply add a whisked egg or egg white into your go-to oatmeal recipe before microwaving, or into simmering oats on the stove.
5. Drink Away Your Hunger
Are you really hungry, or are you actually just thirsty? A study in the journal Physiology & Behavior suggests people inappropriately respond to thirst more than 60 percent of the time by eating instead of drinking. Even if you’re not hankering for a thirst quencher, preloading meals with plain ol’ calorie-free water can shave hundreds of calories from your daily intake. A study published in the journal Obesity found that people who drank two cups of water before eating consumed 75 to 90 fewer calories over the course of a meal than they would otherwise. This may simply be because water is filling, but researchers note the added H2O may satisfy thirst otherwise spent on calorie-laden beverages.
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