Most Americans have been trained since childhood that leaving food on your plate at the end of a meal is impolite; we are admonished repeatedly to ?clean your plate?. Only, far too often, there is far too much food on our plates. Based on current recommended health guidelines, a plate of food served in a restaurant is statistically between 4 and 6 times larger than necessary. Eating half that much at home is still 2 to 4 times more than a recommended, healthy portion. The simple fact of it is: our portions are too big.
Researchers call the ?clean your plate? phenomenon the ?completion compulsion?, which views foods in units that need to be consumed in their entirety in order for us to experience fullness. It's what leads us to eat a whole candy bar instead of a bite, or an entire bag of potato chips (the small ?snack? size you'd get in a vending machine) instead of a small handful of chips.
The completion compulsion was validated in a test that showed people given a smaller plate of food reporting feeling just as full as people given a larger plate of food, showing that people gauged their sense of fullness not on the amount of food they ate but on the emptiness of their plates.
But if we're so conditioned to view food as units, we already have a healthy unit of food in place, and it's called a ?serving?. A single serving of any food is ordinarily somewhere from 90 to 160 calories. This means a food dense in calories will have a small portion size relative to foods light in calories.
The nutritional labeling on packaged foods includes the recommended number of servings. In many cases, however, we eat the entire package without noticing realizing we've just eaten 2, 3, 4, or more servings at once. That means if there are 250 calories in a serving and 3 servings in the package, eating all of it at once would give you 750 calories.
The intention of denoting a serving on the label is to help you devise the right portions for your meals. One serving ought to be one portion, but how often do we do it that way?
Tips for reducing your portion sizes overall include serving your food on smaller plates and serving food in the kitchen rather than at the table where the leftovers are sitting in front of you so temptingly.
Healthy dieting to lose weight need not involve depriving yourself of any of the foods you enjoy ? not one ? if you resolve yourself to reducing the amount of everything that you eat into healthier portions. This way, you can eat any food you like, if you eat a responsible portion of it.
This also means you don't have to reduce your portions of all that you eat uniformly; you don't have to starve yourself. To compensate for the hunger you may feel after reducing portion sizes of your favorite decadent, calorie-rich foods, you can eat a sizable portion of a food light in calories and feel just as full. And by having allowed yourself at least some of the calorie-dense yummy, your taste buds will be just as happy as your waistline.
Weight seems to be a big issue these days with many news articles stating that most of the people in the US are obese, or overweight. Kids these days are also more overweight than kids the same age decades ago. What's my view on the cause of all this, bad diet and no excercise. I know I mentioned that I was able to lose weight without any special diets or extreme workouts but what I did can be just viewed as a normal diet and minimal workout routine.
First, this is how I viewed the human body and food consumption. You take in food and it becomes the nutrition and gives us the energy that we need to function day in and day out. As you go about your day, most of that energy from the food should be used up, if not, it becomes part of your body in the form of fat.
The number one reason why kids these days are overweight has to do with sodas high in sugar, which is basically carbohydrates. Sugar provide tons of energy, and like I said, if it's not all used up, it will become part of your body and increase your weight. This was the first step I took to lose weight and keep it off, I cut down drastically on any soda with a high content of sugar and drank mostly water. If I wanted something with carbonation or flavor, I would pick up some carbonated flavored water, one of which tastes exactly like my favorite welch's grape soda but without any sugar or other additives.
I still ate my favorite foods but just by cutting back on all the sugar in the sodas, I was able to balance the amount of energy I really needed for each day.
The other thing I did was to do just some minor workout at home. I didn't go to the gym or felt that I needed to. I didn't need hour long workouts or heavy lifting to lose any weight. One of the keys to losing weight and keeping it off is to increase your metabolism and doing regular exercises will do just that. The key here is to exercise regularly, not once a week or once a month because that won't do anything at all. I'm talking about exercising maybe four to six times a week and anything from 15 minutes to 30 minutes only each session.
When you exercise, your heart rate increases and there is an optimum rate at which you should be exercising to and by doing this regularly, your metabolism will increase and you'll be burning more fat even when you're not working out. What I did was just jog in place at home in front of the TV. Sometimes I would jog around the rooms or even lift some weights with my dumbbells but mostly, I just jogged in place while watching TV. Now how hard is that to fit into your day?
Also, one of the pitfalls of exercising regularly and not getting results is because you are not drinking enough fluids. You lose a lot of fluids exercising and if your body gets dehydrated, you increase your chances of actually gaining weight. So, drink lots of fluids and I recommend just water and no soda, otherwise you're defeating the purpose.
Basically, that's all I did to lose weight and keep it off. I still drink items that taste great without all those extra additives and sugar, and I didn't have to change my schedule for exercising time.
As an update, the above section was written over a year ago and since then, I have not exercised at all due to my busy schedule. EVen without weekly exercise, I am still able to keep off the weight by following my drinking habits.
By drinking habits, I don't mean alcohol. I mean that I still cut out all soda and drink my favorite carbonated waters that taste just like my favorite sodas without all the extras. I still eat my favorite foods like pizza and so forth.
Both Johny Rider & George Yang are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Johny Rider has sinced written about articles on various topics from Alternative Medicine, Personal Desktop and Attracting Mate. I've been playing world of warcraft for 3 years and i know all the secrets and tips for the game. Check out my free . S. Johny Rider's top article generates over 110000 views. to your Favourites.
George Yang has sinced written about articles on various topics from Personal Desktop, Landscaping and E Books. George Yang is a person who likes to share his personal experiences for the benefit of all. . George Yang's top article generates over 110000 views. to your Favourites.