#portionsizing

LITTLE ABOUT PORTION SIZING: WHAT’S A GOOD INTAKE AND A BAD ONE

Portion sizing is often a little bit more trickier to follow than we would like it to be. That burger from Wendy’s looks a lot better than the salad sitting on our passenger seat, or the day old soup sitting in our fridge at home. That one cup of ice cream during the movie turns into 3 and those 5 cups of coffee in the morning have us wired and hands jittering all over the keyboard. So how do we limit ourselves to only a certain amount and maintain this healthy diet and weight loss, most of us desire? Is it really that easy or is there a special trick to it we don’t know about. Here’s a few ways to curve that hunger, restrict the amount of food you eat and simply eat healthier, without wracking up the grocery bill.

Portion Sizing: Up above (the photo I posted) is a small and simple diagram of the amounts of food we should be consuming. Remember this isn’t a large plate but a regular to smaller one. Half of your plate at dinner time should be covered in veggies. Try to include different variations if you can. A quarter of your plate should be your proteins (meats) and the other quarter your starches (so potatoes, rice, quinoa, etc). Try to replace white rice with brown rice for a healthier choice. Also remember not to overload these sections and defeat the use of oils and fats as much as you can. Try not to fry your meats or boil your veggies because this strips both the proteins and adds more fats. If you are cooking rice, try using a steamer or for one serving, 1/4 cup of rice to 3/4 cup of water in a pot. You can add a pinch of salt and 1/2 tsp of butter to this to soften it up. Stay away from anything that says HYDROGENATED on it, those are the trans fats we don’t need. For breakfast, remember to get your proteins you need throughout the day and to start your morning off right. This can include an egg with multigrain toast and a cup of tea. You can fill all your veggies and fruits into a blended smoothie. If you are an avid coffee drinker, try your best to stick to one cup in the morning and restrict yourself of putting sugar in it. If you must have sweetener, try stevia, cane sugar or organic honey. For lunch half sized salads or half a chicken breast with avocado on bread. Tuna with fruit or even a small soup is good too. Frozen fruit is okay too!

Tips & Tricks To Stop Over Eating: Start your day off right! - As soon as you wake up in the morning, drink either fruit infused water, lemon water or coconut water and wait about 30 minutes before eating anything. This is going to push all the toxins out of your body and fill your stomach enough so you don’t scarf down your breakfast in 10 minutes. Meal Prep & Planning. -Make sure you give yourself enough time to sit down and enjoy your food in the morning. If you don’t have enough time, plan your meals the day before. This method works for lunch and dinner too. To avoid the temptation of reaching for the foods you know are not so good for you, plan your meals by the week and store them away. A lot of us end up reaching for a snack while preparing for our meals and either end up full before we barely started or overeat by eating even when we start to get full. Stop when your body says stop! -Sometimes when we are eating our meals, we start to hit that point where we are kinda full but not quite there. STOP. As soon as you start to feel this, your body is telling you to stop, not to keep eating until you can’t move. By over eating, we are putting all the extra calories our body no longer needs and processing it into fats to be stored since there is no more room for our bodies to break everything down. This is where portion sizing comes in handy. Although it may not look like enough food, trust me, it is. Our bodies are like our vehicles. -The gas in the tank of our cars, is like the food in our stomachs. We do not over fill our tanks so we have gas for later nor do we put the wrong gas in them to ruin them. We stop when it says it’s full and it’s good to us in return. Just like our bodies, if we are good to them, it is good to us. Snacking. -In between meals, we find ourselves a little hungry. But didn’t I just eat? I had the right portion sizes! Of course this happens to all of us and it’s perfectly normal for some bodies to burn more fuel than others. This is because of our metabolism. Grab a healthy snack in between meals, this is usually every 2-3 hours. You can try an apple or some celery sticks. Anything that isn’t high in sugar or fats and more water filled, the better! Remember sugars will turn into those excess fats in time. Keep your body fuelled and metabolised.

Bed time is bed time. - The strongest thing I could encourage you to do and stress, is do not, DO NOT eat right before bed or 4 hours prior. I know this is difficult to some depending on your work schedules but always try your best. Don’t stay out late, don’t pull an all nighter watching Friends reruns, and don’t hover yourself into social media. By going to sleep right away, this doesn’t give your body any time to break down the food you just ate and it all quickly stores itself away into fats. During our sleep, our body actually burns the most calories than during the day. By not allowing this process during your sleep, the body isn’t getting the proper function it needs.

Sleep. -Sleep believe it or not, plays a huge part in our diets. So if you think those 2 extra hours won’t matter, you’re wrong. Getting the right amount of sleep every night, helps keep your body on a fat burning schedule. The better the sleep, the better you eat!

Eat at the table. -Eating in front of Tv’s or our laptops, distracts us from how much we are eating. As silly as this sounds, it is very much true. By distracting ourselves from our food consumption, we end up eating a lot more than what we should be, which is OVEREATING. Sit at a table and enjoy this time with yourself and family.

“BUT I’M NOT HUNGRY.” Not all of us are big eaters, I get it. I never used to be either. In fact, most days I didn’t even eat breakfast. A Tim Hortons run for coffee was the closest thing I got before running into classes or to work. Yet, we still feel tired and are gaining weight. This is why breakfast IS the most important meal of the day. It fuels our bodies and gets our metabolism running. If we don’t, our bodies actually produce MORE fats than even before for the simple reason that because we aren’t fuelling our bodies, it’s trying to take what it needs from places we don’t have to begin with. So by thinking “well if I just eat less or stop eating all together, I lose weight quicker,” you’re very mistaken. You may feel at first your’re losing weight but 9 out of 10 times that weight is coming from our muscle, not our fat and when we do eat again, that is turning straight into fat instead of the nutrients we should be getting. DON’T SKIP A MEAL. It does more harm than good.