Does portion control really work for weight loss?

  Portion control  works for weight loss?

Portion control is a great method to lose weight and monitor your healthy eating.  This post explains what portion control is and offers tons of tips for how to successfully portion control yourself to healthy! 

Portion control is one of the biggest nutrition hacksI’ve found for sticking to a healthy lifestyle, losing weight, and then maintaining my ideal weight.  The idea is to understand what your body needs and just eat to that level.  Oftentimes, either because we feel we have to finish all that’s on our plate or restaurants have pre-determined giant portions, we over-eat, which leads to weight gain.

Enter portion control, which helps us to identify what’s in our food and how much we need to consume to meet our goals.  The hang-up for many people when trying lo lose weight, however, is they think they need to drastically reduce the amount of food they’re eating, which isn’t necessarily the case.  My goal in this post is to share how to portion control without feeling hungry all the time, and still lose the weight (assuming that’s your goal).  The bottom line is that portion control means no food is off limits — it’s just a matter of choice if and when you choose to eat anything.

HOW PORTION CONTROL CAN HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT

In order to lose weight you need to decrease your daily caloric intake, increase your daily physical activity, or do both. One way to decrease your daily caloric intake is to control your portion sizes. It's no secret that we are experiencing a global obesity epidemic. It's also no secret that portion sizes today are two-to-five times the size of what they were 20 years ago. So, not only are we eating more food - we are also eating more fast food and other types of unhealthy foods.

Portion control does not necessarily eliminate foods from your diet. Instead, it teaches you how to eat enough food for energy, nutrients, and pleasure, and stop there. This amount of food should leave you feeling satisfied, but not necessarily full.

Even low-fat and nonfat foods can deliver a lot of excess calories if a person does not control portion sizes. For example, a serving of low-fat ice cream can be a great treat even for someone trying to lose weight, however eating the whole tub is clearly too much.

The main goal of a weight loss diet is to consume less calories than you need to maintain your weight. Focus on choosing nutrient dense foods. This means choosing foods that will provide a lot of the necessary nutrients and a minimal amount of calories. Selecting a bunch of grapes over a class of coke is a good example. They both provide about the same amount of calories, however the grapes provide you with a lot more nutrients than the glass of coke.

Eat smaller portions and focus the majority of your diet on whole grains, legumes, lean protein sources, fresh vegetables and fruit. Eat slowly and limit the amount of high-fat foods you consume. Add in some regular physical activity and you will be well on your way to achieving successful long-term weight loss. Remember, the goal for weight loss is to consume less calories than you burn. Eating less and moving more will help you create the daily caloric deficit you need in order to lose that weight.

Conclusion:

By portioning out our food and controlling the amounts of food we put into our bodies, we can essentially assume control over how much of our food will be stored as fat.  And, if we eat at a calorie deficit, which means we eat less than what our body requires each day to function, we can then make our body use stored fat for energy, which causes weight loss.  The more stored fat your body burns, the more weight you lose, up to a point, which is why we want to make sure we maintain a healthy, balanced diet while we utilize portion control.