One phrase you are bound to hear if you read at all online about weight loss or healthy living is “portion control”.
It’s a fairly simple premise - eat less (or rather, eat better) and you will shed fat and improve your overall health.
My wife and I have been trying different techniques for balancing our food, all based around this central idea of not eating more than we need, and so far it’s going very well.
Before
Last year (and the decade before that) I was an eating machine. It started when I was at school - I was playing squash and fives constantly and growing, of course, so needed a huge amount of food to keep myself going.
Once I left school, my appetite remained high while my requirements dropped dramatically. Squash was replaced with beer, fives with smoking. A serious downward turn in health terms.
Which leads me to the end of last year - no longer smoking, and drinking less, and playing squash regularly but still with that enormous appetite, combined with a love for food. 10 years of overeating and underexercising have me weighing in at 3 stone over my ideal weight, nudging closer to the “obese” bracket of the BMI scale.
Next
It was for this reason that Lindsay (that’s Mrs Dave) and I started looking at portion control. We’d gotten used to large plates of food, often late at night, and not usually particularly healthy food.
While swapping some of our diet for healthier options (less pasta and rice meals, more veg (organic veg boxes ftw)) was possible, and a great start, ultimately we weren’t about to sacrifice enjoying our food for a trim physique. For one thing, that would violate my sustainability law. We also started eating earlier when we could (sometimes Lindsay has a late shift and a late meal is unavoidable).
Together, these started to produce a noticable change. While my weight stayed pretty constant, my shape was changing for the better. And I was feeling more energetic, and sleeping better (there’s a lot to be said for not eating late).
The next step - reducing portions, and eating less but more often - was when I started to notice tangible numeric differences in my weight. I’ve started losing pounds, and that’s a very very good thing. It was also fairly easy to manage.
Tips
We started by cooking larger meals. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but bear with me. We used to cook a meal for the two of us, and often that meal would be big enough for 4 “normal person” portions, but we would eat it as one meal. Just large portions to us. Cooking the equivalent of double that meant that we didn’t just tip whatever was left on our plates if there was only a little bit remaining in the pot, as we had before - instead, we just took a normal portion, and if still hungry later went back for more. We rarely return for seconds.
As an added bonus, I now have far better lunches at work - all fresh, home-cooked food now, instead of microwave pasta from the supermarket.
We’re drinking water with meals. It seems to make them go further, and means we take our time. By the time we finish, our bodies have had time to tell us we’re not hungry. By the same token, we also try and eat at a table rather than in front of the TV - conversation (aside from not being a bad thing in and of itself) helps slow a meal down as well.
We signed up to Riverford deliveries. These guys are one of plenty of companies that will deliver a box of organic fruit and veg to your door on a schedule that suits you. We don’t pick what’s in the box, and that forces us to try new recipes, and to eat more fruit and vegetables. As a consequence, where 2 chicken breasts would have previously been the main ingredient in one meal, they’d now be a smaller part of two healthier meals (that taste better too).
We also have more meat-free meals. This isn’t because meat is bad for you, or because we think meat is murder - we both think vegetarians should be force fed with lard - but it is a good way to ensure a more balanced diet.
We are weighing more stuff before we cook it, and generally being more aware of what’s going into our food. We now measure pasta and rice to ensure we’re cooking only as much as we need. We’re careful with cheese in meals - generally trying to go for small quantities of stronger tasting cheeses. You get the idea.
Finally, we are more careful when eating out. Food in restaurants tends to be very rich, and most of the people we go out with will have three courses. We don’t go out often, but when we do, we no longer view it as important to finish everything on our plates!
