How to Lose Weight Using Portion Control

My main focus is living a healthy life and exercising regularly. Paying attention to what I eat is a primary tool and one of the best techniques for this is paying attention to portion control and serving size. I truly don’t try to lose weight. I have been within five pounds of 155 for the past eight years.

If you are overweight, you can use the portion control tool to jump start your weight loss efforts.

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.

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 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.

Finally, after writing these posts for the past five-plus years, I have come to the conclusion that the secret to achieving the perfect weight is to work on living a healthy life. I eat intelligently and make sure that I get exercise every day. Portion control is a good tool, but just one in living a healthy life.

Tony