How to Lose Weight Using Portion Control

For the record, I advocate living a healthy life, eating intelligently and exercising regularly. I am not into ‘weight loss’ any more. By living healthy, I have melted off excess pounds and they stay off.

If you are carrying extra weight and want a superb tool for getting control of your weight and waist, you must know about portion control and serving size.

This was my idea of a ‘serving’ of pasta. No wonder I was always overweight.

Over the course of the past couple of years, I have found out how very much I didn’t know about the subject. When we started the blog, I began reading about various weight loss techniques. One of the first I encountered was portion control and serving size. I was already counting calories, but I had no feeling at all for portion control. My idea of one serving was the amount I would serve myself. For example, pasta. I love pasta and eat it regularly. Prior to working on the blog, my idea of a serving of pasta was a plateful of it. (See photo).

In fact, one serving of pasta amounts to two ounces dry or about half a cup cooked – an amount about the size of my fist. One serving of pasta yields 200 calories. So, my ignorant serving of a plateful of pasta probably amounted to at least 600 calories and that doesn’t count the sauce. Sometimes I skip the sauce and just serve it with coconut oil and parmesan cheese which is still around another 100 calories. So, before understanding about portion control, I was blithely consuming close to 800 calories of pasta alone. Now, I measure it and consume closer to a single serving for a saving of around 600 calories. For the record, a single serving of pasta is about the size of a baseball.

Ditto ice cream. I love ice cream and used to eat a lot of it, too. Again a serving of ice cream to me was a bowlful, probably three scoops. In fact, a serving of ice cream is a single scoop which, again,  is about the size of a baseball. I wrote up a single serving of vanilla ice cream here.

A single serving of vanilla ice cream amounts to 130 calories. So, as with the pasta, I was consuming around three times the calories that I intended to eat. No wonder I could never keep my weight down.

As I hope you can see from the above – knowledge is power when it comes to weight control. Just knowing the correct serving size and adhering to it, keeps you on the straight and narrow.

I hope this was helpful. I consider portion control to be key to weight control.

Tony