It’s all very simple. If you’re overweight, you’ve simply consumed more calories than you’ve burned.
It’s all very complex. Making the changes you need in your diet and lifestyle is difficult. Transitioning your body to a lower weight means safely and healthily adjusting long-held eating habits, while ensuring your body gets the energy and nutrition needed for its well being as it struggles with the changes.
In other words, you need all the help you can get.
The Power of Portion Control
When people actually get serious about their weight loss, they’re surprised to find that it isn’t simply about condemning themselves to a relatively short time of eating bland food and feeling hungry.
Healthy weight loss is an ongoing pursuit. It can include many of the regular grocery store foods you enjoy. Instead of drastically cutting calories for a short time, weight loss is really about making healthy adjustments to your diet.
One of those adjustments is how much you eat at a meal. Regardless of what you eat, the more of it you eat, the more calories you will need to burn later. Or face the consequences of putting on even more weight.
Portion control means using guidelines to help eat a balanced diet and avoid overeating.
Your Approach to Portion Control Can Make or Break It’s Success
Whether you call it portion control, or just eating less, it’s not a quick, easy solution. It takes practice and perseverance. And it works.
But how you approach portion control, your mindset, can be the determining factor on whether it is successful or not.
In a brain imaging study, researchers assembled two groups of people. The body weights of one group were considered ‘normal’ according to medical guidelines. The second group was made up of people who were considered obese.
Study participants were asked to think about one of three different things before eating.
- The health effects of the food they were about to eat.
- Their expected pleasure of eating the food
- Their intention to stay full between lunch and dinner
The food portions chosen by both the normal-weight and obese groups differed after only one of the thoughts. After thinking about the pleasure of eating the food, the obese participants chose larger portions than the normal-weight group.
But both groups adjusted their portions in the same way when they thought about the health effects of the food and when they thought about staying full between meals.
Thinking about the health effects got participants in both groups to eat smaller portions. When they thought about staying full, they ate larger portions.
So thinking about your health, and the health of what you eat, can help you eat less.
But, in addition to finding out what might seem obvious to some, the study reveals an example of how healthy weight loss can be difficult. It’s easy to think you should eat larger main meals so you aren’t so tempted to eat in between meals.
The truth is your body likes consistency. Instead of not getting any energy between meals. then suddenly needing to deal with a huge intake of food, it likes to keep a steadier flow of food energy coming in.
Smaller meals using portion control and healthy snacking can help you avoid overeating, stave off the hunger pangs and give your body the nutrition and energy it takes to help you lose weight healthily.
There are lots of other ways to help make the transition to a lower weight a little easier. For example, if you have a glass of water while you’re thinking of the health effects of the foods you choose, you’ll eat even less. To learn more, call or visit your nearest Herbal One Centre and talk to a nutritional consultant.