In today’s “super-sized” world, it can be easy to gain weight. Many people have become so accustomed to seeing heaping plates and oversized food and drink portions in restaurants that they’ve come to think of them as normal. Unfortunately, this misperception of proper food portions is the root of unhealthy weight gain in many individuals. If you want to lose weight and get healthy without resorting to restrictive diets, you might simply need to learn what proper food portions look like.
Meal-Sized Snacks and Feast-Sized Meals
Without even realizing it, many people today are eating snacks that are sized more like a meal, and meals that our ancestors would have thought were a feast. Because most people can’t even recognize a properly sized portion of food, obesity is quickly becoming a serious problem for many. After all, even healthy and low-calorie foods can cause a person to gain weight if one eats them in too large of portions.
If you think you are eating a healthy diet but you’re still not losing weight, your food portion sizes could be to blame. In order to help understand how much food you are really consuming, it can be helpful to use a few tools. First, you’ll want to invest in a good food scale. An accurate set of measuring cups and spoons can also be quite helpful. Once you have a food scale and some measuring utensils, try measuring or weighing the quantity of everything you eat for a week. Keep a food journal during this week, taking care to mark down your food portion sizes. Then, at the end of a week, compare the quantities you ate to a reputable diet guide or calorie chart. If a particular food is commonly calculated in half-cup measurements but your food journal reveals you frequently eat two cups, then this is a good sign that your customary food portions are much too large.
Retraining Your Portion Perception
Once you understand that your food portions are too large, it’s important to retrain yourself. There are plenty of books and online sites that picture examples of properly sized food portions. Once you’ve retrained yourself and stop overeating, you’ll probably find that losing weight will be effortless. Since you’ll be eating normal sized portions instead of super-sized meals, you’ll automatically be consuming fewer calories. Once you bring your daily calorie consumption down, you’ll find that the pounds will simply drop off.
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