How to choose staple foods for weight loss? 3 types of high-quality alternatives that allow you to eat until you're full without gaining weight.

How to Choose Delicious and Non-Fattening Staple Foods

1. High-Quality Staple Foods Rich in Dietary Fiber

How can you choose staple foods during weight loss to feel full, eat well, and avoid gaining weight? First, we need to understand a concept: from a professional perspective, sugar belongs to carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are a large category, including sugars, starches, and dietary fiber. Among these, sugars and starches are what cause the excessive secretion of obesity-related hormones, and are what we should avoid consuming. Sugary and starchy foods include sugary snacks, beverages, sauces, condiments, and common refined staple foods (such as rice, noodles, porridge, cakes, and bread).

However, dietary fiber, also a type of carbohydrate, does not behave the same way as sugar and starch. It not only doesn't cause the excessive secretion of the obesity hormone insulin, but it also has excellent effects on stabilizing blood sugar, increasing satiety, and maintaining healthy gut flora. Dietary fiber is abundant in fresh vegetables. Therefore, we should prioritize choosing root vegetables that are rich in dietary fiber and more nutritionally complete as our staple food.

Compared to wheat, which contains a large amount of gluten, and rice, which has had its bran and germ removed, leaving only the endosperm with little nutritional value but a large amount of starch, root vegetables contain not only starch but also dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. Although root vegetables also contain starch, the dietary fiber mixed with the starch increases the time it takes for the body to digest and break down the food, allowing the starch-derived glucose to be released slowly into the bloodstream, indirectly helping to regulate blood sugar levels and preventing the excessive secretion of the obesity hormone insulin.

Common natural root vegetables that can replace refined rice and noodles as staple foods include pumpkin, carrots, sweet potatoes, purple sweet potatoes, lotus root, taro, and potatoes. If a meal includes a bowl of rice and a plate of spicy and sour potato shreds (this is a combination of refined staple food + high-quality staple food), then the sugar content in this meal will be seriously excessive. Therefore, we should include root vegetables as a significant portion of our meals, complemented by non-starchy leafy green vegetables and protein- and fat-rich meats and eggs. This approach helps reduce the secretion of fat-promoting hormones while providing a richer supply of nutrients. This meal combination is excellent for both increasing nutrient intake and promoting weight loss.

2. Simple Main Course Weight Loss Method

Besides replacing refined carbohydrates with root vegetables, we can also use resistant starch to help balance blood sugar levels and prevent excessive secretion of fat-promoting hormones. What is resistant starch?

Resistant starch is different from regular starch. In fact, resistant starch is considered a type of dietary fiber because, like dietary fiber, it is resistant to digestion. Many studies have shown that resistant starch is beneficial to health; for example, it can lower blood sugar levels, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce appetite, and improve digestive health.

The simplest way to obtain resistant starch is to cook and then cool root vegetables! Cooking and then cooling starchy foods converts some of the regular starch into resistant starch. Therefore, if you steam enough root vegetables like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, potatoes, and purple sweet potatoes for 2-3 days at once, then refrigerate them, and use them to replace refined rice and noodles at mealtime, it can better help with weight loss.

However, it's important to note that dietary fiber and resistant starch are not a panacea; they cannot offset the effects of consuming excessive amounts of sugar and starch. Therefore, even with high-quality carbohydrates, we cannot consume them without restraint. If we consume too many root vegetables, the excess regular starch will also be converted into excess glucose and stored as fat in our bodies. Therefore, it is recommended that high-quality carbohydrates constitute only 30% of each meal.

The order of eating also affects blood sugar levels. For example, eating vegetables and meat/eggs first, and then the main course, can stabilize blood sugar fluctuations, which will significantly reduce the stimulation of fat-promoting hormones.

3. More Delicious Main Course Options

Besides root vegetables, what other high-quality main course options are available? In fact, there are many staple foods that are beneficial for health and weight loss, such as konjac products. Previously, the konjac products we commonly ate were konjac knots boiled in hot pot; now, konjac products come in many more forms, including konjac rice and konjac noodles, which are very similar to the rice and noodles we usually eat. They are excellent substitutes for refined rice and noodles.

Konjac contains almost no starch or sugar and does not stimulate the secretion of insulin, a hormone associated with obesity. At the same time, the glucomannan in konjac is an excellent prebiotic, which is very helpful in improving constipation and promoting the absorption of calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc. However, choosing a good konjac product requires some considerations. First, avoid konjac snacks with a large number of additives. Second, when buying konjac rice and noodles, try to choose pure, natural konjac products without added wheat flour, oat flour, etc.

If you like to eat bread-like staple foods, you can also use eggs to replace flour. For example, an egg pancake with bacon and vegetables is a great alternative staple food; and the traditional Chinese dish, egg dumplings, perfectly solves the problem of refined flour and gluten. Eggs are truly a delicious and amazing ingredient; you can make delicious egg pancakes and egg dumplings without using any flour at all.

Women who love bread can replace the flour used in baking with almond flour and coconut flour, which have lower sugar content. Of course, you can also add chia seeds or psyllium husk powder to enhance the flavor. Compared to wheat flour, almond flour and coconut flour are gluten-free and contain more dietary fiber and a large amount of magnesium, which is very beneficial for balancing blood sugar.

In fact, the choice of staple foods is not limited to rice and noodles; there are a wide variety of ingredients to choose from. Whether for weight loss or overall health, we should choose high-quality staple foods that are more nutrient-dense and stimulate obesity hormones less.