Standardized Meals

This could be said another way: eat the same few meals over and over.

This is a simple strategy but has profound benefits and has proven to be a winning strategy for long-term weight loss.

How to do it:

1. Find a few (3 - 5) good healthy recipes or Magic Meals that you like and stick with them.
2. Make a list of healthy snacks, and get into the habit of eating them (and keep them on hand!)
3. Decide what vegetables and fruit you like, and buy those over and over at the grocery store.

Background Details

There are a number of reasons this works so well.

Let's start with...

1. You don't have to continually decide what to do -- grocery shopping and preparation become easy -- it becomes habit
2. You know you will like the food and that it fits your goals
3. You know that they will help you lose weight because you deliberately picked them for that reason
4. You only have to figure out how many calories the meal contains the first time you have it, making it easier to track your daily calories in the future

Eating standardized meals also happen to follow a few other principles like:

• Palatability and Variety: Because there isn't a huge amount of variety, you're less likely to overeat. (Related: Uniformity Method). And if you have picked foods from the Fat-Burning Foods list, most likely they will taste good yet they aren't "food with no brakes" (see Trigger Foods) that cause you to overeat.
• Better Food Environment: Because you know what ingredients you need to buy, you are more in control of your environment (see Food Environment).