Small Changes, Big Results

Step 1: Choose labor-intensive snacks
Your brain needs about 20 minutes to register fullness. Nuts that require cracking, grapefruit that must be sectioned or edamame that need shelling will all slow you down, and slow down the speed of your eating.

Step 2: Get "mind-full"
If you take a small bit of a snack, like chips or nuts, put your serving into a small dish, and then put the bags away. The old adage of "out of sight, out of mind" rings true here. If you purposefully ration off a certain amount of food and don't have a large container of it sitting nearby, you're less likely to go back for seconds and thirds.

Step 3: Invest in new plates
Eating on smaller plates may help you consume less. Researchers from Cornell University served snack mix in two different-size bowls: a four-liter bowl and a two-liter bowl. Study subjects took 53 percent more snack mix from the larger bowl.

Step 4: Have an appetizer
Studies show that dishes that contain a lot of water (like water-based soups — NOT cream-based) or fiber (like salad) can help you eat less overall. Try a water-based soup like minestrone to start your meal so that you'll eat less of your entrée. Avoid cheeses and high-fat dressings, because they'll only set you back in your diet.

Step 5: Pack in the produce
Dieting is the perfect excuse to start eating all the fruits and vegetables you're supposed to eat regularly. Packed with nutrients, and about 40 calories a serving, vegetables are what one would call "power food." Packing the veggies onto your plate will help you eat less of other foods in your meal. Vegetables really bulk up the look of your plate, so you'll feel like you're eating a lot.

Step 6: Practice "NEAT-ness"
The folks at the Mayo Clinic have created a new approach to exercise that can help you burn calories without going to the gym. They call it NEAT (for "non-exercise activity thermogenesis"), and basically, it gauges how many calories you burn outside workouts.

According to the Mayo researchers, the calories that people burn in their everyday activities, their NEAT, are far more important in obesity than previously imagined. For instance, an obese person sits 150 minutes more each day than their naturally lean counterparts on average. This means obese people burn 350 fewer calories a day than do lean people. By kicking up mundane activities throughout the day — think pacing while you're on the telephone, getting up from your desk to take a five-minute walk every hour — you'll burn more calories and, hence, be able to burn off those extra pounds more easily.