Are your meals missing these two key ingredients?

I’m a big proponent of balancing your meals with a combination of protein, fat, and carbs—what we call the macronutrients—as often as you can.

This approach helps regulate blood sugar, balances energy levels, and helps keep you satiated in between meals and snacks (which means no more feeling famished an hour after breakfast). Plus, it's a great way to ensure you’re getting lots of helpful nutrients.

There are two other key ingredients to gentle nutrition that people often overlook… volume and satisfaction.

Volume: Adding volume to your meals is a way to ensure you’re getting enough food to fill you up. As you eat and food hits your stomach, the stretch receptors there signal to your brain that you’re filling up. It takes a bit of time for this process to play out, which is why slowing down your meals is so helpful when you’re trying to connect with your fullness cues.

Colorful fruits and veggies are a great, nutrient-dense way to add volume or bulk to your meals. This can make a meal more visually satisfying, but it also adds fiber (which helps keep you fuller for longer periods of time and has so many other health benefits), vitamins, minerals, and health-promoting antioxidants and phytonutrients.

Once I choose what I’m in the mood to eat, I try to follow that decision up with the question, “how can I (or do I want to) add more colorful volume to this meal?”

Satisfaction: I talk about this again and again because it’s not only super important but pretty much the opposite of most nutrition messages out there. Food and eating well should be enjoyable… if it’s not, you’re unlikely to continue eating that way.

Add fruits and veggies, whole grains, and lean proteins—yes! But be sure to eat them in ways that are enjoyable and choose things you’re hankering for. This may mean varying your cooking methods or adding fun sauces and dips.

Hummus, tzatziki, bean dip, guacamole, flavored olive oils and balsamic vinegars, and fresh salsa are some of my personal favorites.

Taken together these two missing ingredients are another tool to help you land on a forever approach to food and gentle nutrition. Volume will help you feel physically full, while satisfaction will help you feel emotionally full.

Both are key to landing on an amount of food that’s feels good in your body!