Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Portion sizes

One of the things I'm paying more attention to are portion sizes.  I'm not measuring everything out, but I am doing my best to estimate the appropriate portion.  It is making a huge difference in my eating habits.

Currently, I am easily eating half the amount of food I used to eat.  Breakfast would be 2 or 3 eggs, 3 or 4 pieces of bacon and a couple slices of toast.  If I were eating pancakes, I would have 3 or 4 with syrup, 3 or 4 sausage links and possibly 2 eggs.  Now I eat 1 egg and 2 pieces of bacon or 2 pancakes with 2 pieces of sausage.  Lunch would be a sandwich, some chips, maybe a salad or soup and a couple cookies or a snack cake.  My typical lunch now is 16 ounces of soup, a small salad and a dinner roll.  Dinner would easily be 2 servings of what ever we were having, unless it was something I really liked (for example, my wife's city chicken!) and then it might be 3 servings.  Now I have one serving and check for the serving size on packaging.

I've said before that I have yet to be hungry during this process.  If anything, I am less hungry than I used to be.  I can only assume that my stomach is shrinking to a more normal size.  I know that last year a bowl of soup and a salad would never have carried me until dinner.

However, I'm worried that I'll easily fall back into old habits.  This is one aspect of my life that I think I will always struggle with.  First, we live in a super-sized world.  Restaurants serve us ridiculous portions and I think we would feel cheated if they didn't!  Processed foods that we would normally consider one serving are sometimes counted as multiple servings to keep the nutritional info low.  I remember eating a muffin from a warehouse club that was considered 2 servings per muffin!

Take some time and look at what you're eating.  Weigh out 4 ounces of meat or 3/4 cup of cereal and I think you'll be surprised at what a serving really is.

There aren't any gimmicks I can use to help with this either.  It'll just have to be something I'll have to always think about and work to make good choices.

I lost another pound this week and looking back I realize that I didn't update for last week, so I lost 2 pounds in 2 weeks.

On January 2nd I weighed in at 370.6 pounds
On March 4th I weighed in at 353.6 pounds

17 lbs lost so far.


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