Sleep apnea can really be exacerbated by excess weight. This weight can cause your throat to be tighter, reducing your ability to breathe properly. Soft tissue can fall into the back of your throat, reducing your airflow. When you first get diagnosed with sleep apnea, most doctors will recommend that you attempt to lose some weight. This article will give you some tips on losing weight sensibly and safely.
Increase Your Protein
Protein is a natural way of suppressing your appetite whilst getting full up. The approach of eating nothing but protein is used in many diets, including the Atkins diet. That doesn’t mean eat lots of red meat – try to increase your intake of chicken, turkey and pork, and try to eat oily fish. You can eat beef, but eat the lowest fat variety that you can find. Don’t buy burgers, make them yourself. One of the best things you can do is make homemade burgers from chicken mince or turkey mince instead.
Eat Less Carbohydrates
Try to limit your intake of carbohydrates to two regular-sized portions a day. Most people will eat carbohydrates with every meal, and that is not good for weight loss. Examples of these portions would be one jacket potato or two slices of bread or 150g fries or small handful rice or 40g dried pasta. Eat protein with the carbohydrates where possible.
Eat LOTS of Vegetables
I want you to think of vegetables as unlimited. That’s right – unlimited. Eat as many as you like. Eat them for breakfast, eat them for dinner, and eat them for supper. Snacking on carrot sticks or celery sticks in the middle of the day is far better than picking up a bag of potato chips. Even if you do eat lots and lots of vegetables, you should cook them in a healthy way – steam them or boil them in boiling water. With things like asparagus, cooking them on a griddle pan without any oil is a delicious way to get a roasted flavour out of a vegetable without using oil.
Don’t Eat Lots of Fruit
Fruits are a wonderful way of satisfying sweet cravings and releasing energy. If you’re not used to fruit though and don’t eat it very often, you shouldn’t treat them in the same way as vegetables and just have lots and lots of them as they do contain a lot of sugar and you could find that they don’t really help your weight loss journey. Equally, don’t drink lots of shop bought smoothies. They’re not as good for you as homemade smoothies.
Cut the Junk!
Don’t eat junk food or at least limit your intake of junk food. I’m a chocaholic, so I give myself a few squares of chocolate a day to quell any cravings. That’s all you need – to quell your cravings. Figure out ways to make food taste the way you want it to without using lots of fat. One of the nicest things I eat is a weight conscious pizza made with an opened pitta bread, homemade tomato sauce, low fat cheese and wafer thin ham. It gives you the taste of pizza but without the fat. Equally, when you’re cooking anything in a frying pan, less than a tbsp. of extra virgin olive oil will do the job. Even better, use low-fat cooking spray.
Example Menu
Breakfast: 2 slices toast, (1 carbohydrate), 2 scrambled eggs made with low-fat milk, salt and pepper, 2 slices grilled bacon that’s been stripped of fat, 1 tbsp. tomato ketchup
Lunch: Large green salad topped with slices of ham, cucumber, tomato, 2 tbsp. garlic dressing followed by non-fat yoghurt and an apple
Dinner: Homemade turkey burgers made with turkey mince, served in wholemeal buns, served with butternut squash fries that have been baked in the oven and a large green salad, followed by 1 small bar of chocolate