How To Organize Your Pantry For Weight Loss Success
If you’re struggling to balance your desire for delicious food with your weight loss journey, you’re not alone on this challenging road. In the US alone, the weight loss industry is worth a whopping $3.4 billion—and 62.9% of those on a weight loss journey eat less to reach their goals. However, eliminating foods is not the only way, or even the most effective way, to lose weight. Instead, the best weight loss programs encourage you to change your mindset on food. Look at them as being either “nutritious” or “less nutritious,” not “good” or “bad.” Doing so is far more sustainable, as it helps you avoid cutting out essential food groups or denying yourself food you want to eat.
One way to apply this mindset is by fixing up your pantry in a way that motivates you to eat healthier more often. Wondering how to get started? Here are 3 tips for organizing your pantry for weight loss success.
Use sight to your advantage
When you’re deciding what to snack on, you don’t dawdle for ten minutes at your shelves debating what the best option is—you grab what’s in your line of sight. You can take advantage of that tendency. Place healthy foods front and center so they’re the first thing you see once you open your pantry. That way, you’re more likely to grab that newly-bought bag of flavored walnuts or sunflower seeds the next time you want to grab something to munch. In the same way, you can hide your unhealthier snacks so they’re out of sight and out of mind. Place them on the highest shelves or well within a cabinet.
Portion out your snacks
Whether you’re snacking on trail mix or salty chips, delicious foods have one thing in common: you want to keep eating them. That’s absolutely fine until you cross the line into overeating. It doesn’t help that many junk foods come in large packets, tempting you to keep going even after you’re full.
That’s why portion control is such an important aspect of weight loss—and you can optimize your pantry for that! Simply set a few containers aside for portioning your snacks before putting them away. For example, you can separate and pack the cookies into snack-sized portions and put them in separate Ziploc bags. That way, you’ll have the exact amount of food to nibble on whenever you need to sate your hunger between meals—and you can continue losing weight while eating your favorite foods.
Make your space aesthetic and appetizing
We like to spend time in places that bring us physical and psychological comfort because doing so helps improve our mood. While you won’t necessarily be hunkering down in your pantry, simply having a beautiful and functional pantry can help your brain associate cooking and eating with pleasure and relaxation—and since cooking meals at home means you have more control over what goes into your meals, an aesthetic pantry can ultimately boost your weight loss efforts.
Though the final aesthetic you choose will depend on your personal style, you can start by establishing zones within your pantry so you can find things more easily. This can be as specific as allocating a shelf for color-coded granola bars or as wide-reaching as having a breakfast foods section. From there, you can focus on glamorizing those zones with baskets, turn-tables, and mason jars.
You don’t need to restrict what you eat to lose weight. Simply organizing the food you have in your pantry can give you the best chance of achieving healthy weight loss. To learn more about home organization strategies that work, we offer many simple solutions anyone can manage.
