Portion control

Portion size is one of the most important aspects of eating healthy. It’s also an important part of manipulating people into buying food at certain restaurants.You’ve probably heard the criticisms about the burger chains “super-sizing”, which caused many of them to stop offering those extra-gigantic portions. What you may not realize, however, is that the average meal of a burger, fries and soda can easily come to about 1,000 calories. For one small meal.

They sell food that way because it looks appetizing to your eyes, which causes you to buy. And once the food’s in front of you, you have ten thousand years of evolved instinct telling you to eat it all, because more is good and who knows when you’ll see food again. Intellectually, you know times have changed but instinct is hard to fight.

You can control serving sizes in your kitchen. Start serving smaller and smaller portions, giving your eyes time to adjust to the new quantities. You can always get seconds later, but give your stomach twenty minutes, because that’s how long it takes to let your brain know it’s full.

One of the best ways to retrain how you look at restaurant portions is to split entrees when you order to go food. Two roommates can easily eat one entree from a Chinese restaurant, especially with the rice. For a family of five, it looks like a bounty if you order three entrees (or a couple of entrees and some appetizers) and let everyone get a serving from each entree, buffet style. What you’ll gradually learn is that the average restaurant portion is between 2 and 4 times what any individual needs in one sitting.

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Posted in Health and Beauty on February 8, 2008