Diet

7 Winter Diet Tips Nutritionists Swear By

Prevent unwanted padding this season with the diet tips experts rely on to save their own waistlines

by Nancy Rones

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Slurp away a voracious appetite Not only does it warm the soul, but a steaming bowl of soup is also one nutritionist's secret to calorie-control.

"Most Sundays in the winter, I make a pot of a non-cream vegetable soup to keep in my refrigerator for the week," says Joan Salge Blake, RD, and media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. "At work, I'll eat a small container of the soup right before having the rest of my lunch, and then when I walk in the door starving, I have a mug of warm soup before dinner. It's a therapeutic, low-cal way to curb my appetite -- and research has shown that eating soup before a meal can slash the overall number of calories you consume."

Down a first-course of low-calorie soup and you might cut the total number of calories of that meal by as much as a whopping 20 percent, according to Pennsylvania State University research. Stick to soup varieties that weigh in at about 100 to 150 calories per serving.

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