It’s time for a “Resolution Revolution!” I have partnered with the Incredible Egg to discuss how to revolutionize your New Year’s resolutions. The number one pitfall in making your New Year’s resolutions is that they are not realistic. Your typical New Year’s Resolution is short-term and vague which usually ends up setting you up for failure. To increase the odds of success, your goals have to be attainable and able to be measured.
The first step to creating a successful resolution is to develop a step-by-step action plan for exactly how to get there. You may say “I want to control my hunger and not overeat” or “I want to lose weight,” which are good goals, but they are too broad. How are you going to control your hunger? What steps are you going to take to manage your weight and get you where you need to be? Once you figure this out, you have to make sure your environment is supportive of these goals by making yourself a game plan. A high percentage of people are unable to actually meet their well-intentioned goals because their resolution is little more than a wish when they don’t have a strategy.
To control hunger, I recommend eating every 3-4 hours and being sure to include protein in all of these meals and snacks. Given my experience with thousands of clients, many of them forget to add protein, but this is a very simple way to control hunger as protein keeps you feeling fuller for longer until your next meal. To achieve this goal, the best way is to start small and begin adding protein to your mid-afternoon snacks. This is a critical time to add protein because it prevents you from overeating during dinner time.
I recommend to my clients to add eggs as a source of protein to their snacks around 3-4 pm. Some delicious ideas are:
- 1 Hard boiled egg + 1 apple
- 1 Hard boiled egg + 2 tablespoons hummus
- 1 Hard boiled egg + 5 prunes
- 2 scrambled eggs + salsa
- 1 scrambled egg avocado wrap (1 egg + 1/3 slice avocado + 5” corn tortilla)
Why eggs? Eggs are a nutrition powerhouse, with one large egg containing 6 grams of high-quality protein and nine essential amino acids, all for 70 calories. Don’t toss the yolk! Yolks contain most of the egg’s nutrients like choline, vitamin B12, selenium and more than 40 percent of the protein in an egg. The yolk also includes fat-soluble nutrients like vitamin D, E, A, and the carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin.
Cooked eggs are simple and quick to make, and hard boiled eggs are a conveniently portable protein snack to have handy making eggs the perfect tool to control your hunger. So, make a goal that is realistic and quantifiable. For example, adding eggs to your snacks at least three times a week is a good place to start. Since you are promising yourself to do this only three days a week, you have a much better chance of success, which will do wonders for your morale and give you the feeling of achievement we don’t often get with New Year’s resolutions.
Once you conquer this goal, you may start shooting higher for yourself as you build confidence and begin to see how this small change is making a big difference in your hunger. Next thing you know, you could be adding protein every day to all of your meals and this new practice becomes a habit and a lifestyle that helps you continue to control your hunger all year long.
