A dietary, healthy dinner should be easy to digest and consist of wholesome products. It is important not to avoid this meal on a diet. Because eating dinner prevents nighttime overeating and sudden drops in blood glucose? What time should you eat dinner? What to eat in the evening to lose weight? Check out 5 ideas for a diet dinner.
What to eat for a diet dinner?
For some, dinner is the most important, and often even the only meal of the day. After returning from work, just before bedtime, they eat a lot, fatty, sweet and… they can’t sleep. Others, following weight loss diets, give up dinner and… They wake up hungry in the middle of the night.
Meanwhile, every day we should eat 5 small meals regularly, including dinner. This allows you to avoid a sharp drop in blood glucose levels and hunger pangs in the evening and at night. There is a lot of truth in the saying “eat like a king in the morning and like a beggar in the evening”. A dietetic but filling dinner is even essential for those who are losing weight – it prevents night eating and sleep problems. Stressed and tired people should also not forget about the evening meal, because hunger intensifies the symptoms of stress.
What to eat in the evening to avoid gaining weight?
A diet dinner should constitute 20 percent of the energy value of the diet and consist of protein products, vegetables that do not have bloating properties and wholegrain cereal products. You should refrain from:
- fatty dishes,
- fast food,
- Pizza
- sweet snacks,
- Fruit.
For dinner, both fresh vegetable salads and hot dishes will be great.
Healthy food for dinner. What can you eat at night?
What to eat before bed to sleep well? In the evening, we don’t need as much energy as we do at noon. So let’s eat lightly and low in calories, preferably no more than 250 kcal, which will benefit our figure and health. The dinner menu should not miss:
mixed and wholemeal bread (but not more than 1-2 slices),
- lean dairy products (m.in. cottage cheese, kefir, natural yoghurt or buttermilk),
- filling lean types of meat, poultry and poultry sausages.
- sea fish (e.g. tuna, salmon).
Let’s enjoy vegetables and fruits with less fiber. Let’s choose lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, sprouts, citrus fruits and cooked vegetables. By combining them properly, we can prepare a nutritious and appetizing salad in no time.
Such multi-ingredient snacks are tasty and enrich the diet with wholesome protein from dairy products, fish, meat and eggs, carbohydrates (rice, pasta) and fiber, vitamins and minerals.
Diet dinner. What not to eat at night?
Why can’t I sleep? When composing a diet dinner, it is best to avoid: fatty meat dishes, especially fried and reheated in fat, fast food, fries, chips and pizza, because they promote overweight. For the same reason, sweet snacks are also not recommended: in addition to fat, they provide a lot of simple sugars – they rapidly raise blood glucose levels, but after 2 hours you feel like snacking again. This is a common cause of evening and night snacking, which leads to overweight.
You should also be cautious about drinking milk in the evening. Although a cup of warm milk is an excellent natural sleep aid, it can immediately cause unpleasant discomfort (diarrhea and abdominal pain) in people suffering from lactose intolerance.
Some vegetables with a high fiber content are not recommended, e.g. white and red cabbage, stewed or fried onion vegetables (onions, leeks), which also contain pungent essential oils. It is also worth remembering that fiber, although very healthy, in excess can cause increased fermentation in the digestive tract, which entails unpleasant gastrointestinal ailments, m.in. a feeling of fullness, pressure, and even abdominal pain.
In some people, digestive problems occur even after eating fruit, e.g. raw apples with skin, plums or cherries. Similar symptoms can be caused by a few tablespoons of baked beans, pea soup or broad beans. Legumes have a lot of bloating sugars. Of course, strong tea and coffee are also on the black list, which have a stimulating effect and make it difficult to fall asleep.