Portion Sizes – Too Much of a Good Thing?
It can be frustrating when, despite eating all of the right foods as part of a healthy weight loss plan, the scales don’t reflect all of your hard work! So maybe its time to ask yourself – If you are eating the right foods and still not seeing any weight loss, are you simply having too much of a good thing?!
When there are so many diets to choose from and so much advice to be taken on the subject it can be hard to work out which will work best for you and your body. And so we all know that the most fundamental rule to lose weight, which forms the foundation of all diet plans, is simply that we must eat less food and so consume less calories. So while you can pat yourself on the back for steering clear of biscuits, pizza and cake and eating only the very healthiest selection of wholemeal pasta, vegetables and lean meat, the fact remains that if you are eating too much of those good foods, you can still be consuming too many calories!
Whether you are simply continuing a healthy eating plan which incorporates all food types or just starting out on a weight loss plan and dramatically altering your eating habits, being aware of your portion sizes makes it much easier for you to lose weight in a healthy and nutritionally balanced way, and is the key to steady and maintained weight loss.
But in a world where everywhere we turn, food has become “super sized” it is easy to lose sight of what a healthy portion of food is. In fact research has shown that the average portion size has increased by as much as 5 times in the last 30 years. And because over time we have come to expect larger meals and see them as the standard, it is easy to feel deprived if we eat less. So how can we work out just how much we should be eating?
There are things that you can do to help your portion control. We have all heard about Liz Hurley’s habit of using a child size plate as her own version of the diet plate! She claims that it tricks her brain into thinking she has eaten more food. And while this might at first seem odd, it actually backs up the findings of a recent study showing that when we are served larger portions we will continue to eat long after our body tells us we are full. Whereas when we are served smaller portions of the same food we will feel just as satisfied.
The best way to lose weight & control your portion is with the Diet Plate from SlimmingSolutions
A lot of people find it most challenging to control the amount of food they eat when they are eating out. While “small” options for take away coffees or soft drinks can seem tiny in comparison to the larger sizes available, they are actually more than adequate to satisfy your thirst or caffeine craving. Do not be tempted by them because they seem to represent better value for money – the small saving is not enough to justify the extra calories you will be consuming!
When eating in a restaurant or any other situation where you have absolutely no portion control, do not feel that you have to finish every scrap of food on your plate. Learn to listen to your body and recognise when you are full, and stop there! While you begin to re-train your brain into recognising this feeling and re-program your stomach to expect smaller meals, there are other ways to help you control your portion sizes.
Drink water or herbal tea to help combat any initial desire to eat larger meals – remember that it is only out of habit, your body’s expectation for its usual larger portions and not a real hunger.
Using tools like a smaller plate or a portion control plate, such as the diet plate, can help you stick to controlled portions simply and without having to use guesswork or have the inconvenience of weighing out food.
One of the benefits of using the diet plate is that it uses very clear guidelines on the surface of the plate to illustrate how much of each food group should be on your plate – a more sophisticated version of Liz Hurley’s method. In this way you can eat things like carbs, which we all know can be extremely calorific when eaten in large quantities, without worrying that you have blown your diet. And statistics show that when we don’t exclude certain foods from our diet we are far more likely to maintain our figure in the long term.
Diet Plates are the best way to lose weight and you can buy them from us… stocks are strictly limited!
