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!

Last year I was something of a cookie monster. Maryland cookies are awesome, and it is (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) physically impossible to leave cookies in an open pack, uneaten. Scientists are stumped, unable to conduct any experiments to find the cause of this problem - whenever they open a pack of cookies to conduct some experiments, the cookies are eaten before any tests can begin. C’est la vie.

I don’t mean to imply, either, that cookies were my only vice. Yorkies were often found … well, actually, the wrappers were often found … around my desk. (In fact, if you really want to see the sort of snacks I used to eat … it’s not pretty, but I’ve written a list of the 10 snacks I miss most.)

This may go some way to explaining away a few of my many extra pounds.

When I started writing this blog, I knocked the snacks on the head, mostly. I still indulge occasionally, but it is rare now - I view chocolate and snacks as rare treats.

Today, I brought such a treat into work - chocolate covered coffee beans. These things are awesome. I’d advise against just eating a handful - if you do, you’ll be bouncing off the walls in no time.

I also think they’re (as snacks go) reasonably healthy. A little dark chocolate is good for you, and even though the merits and faults of caffeine are still discussed at length, I’m still of the opinion that coffee is good for you. You can’t eat too many of these things, either, or you’ll go crazy with caffeine-madness.

Which got me thinking about snacks at work. Obviously, snacks should be avoided as a rule, but presumably some are better than others? Are there snacks that are good for you? Snacks that actually benefit you? Should you eat fruit between meals? Dried fruit? Nuts? Seeds? Steak?

Do you snack? What do you eat, if you snack between meals?

Most of the adult population will have been celebrating in some small way for the last few days. Some may still be nursing hangovers, having overdone the beer/spirits/champagne.

Peer pressure issues aside, it’s not actually easy to find a healthy alternative drink in the pub. Sure, there are other drinks than beer or JD and coke, but most are still bad for you. Fruit juices are very high in sugar and while fine in moderate quantities are not really suitable for drinking by the pint. Some wines are ok, but reds are no good over a glass or so.

5. White Spirits

That’s spirits, plural, not spirit. Don’t go getting confused.

White spirits like vodka, gin and bacardi are generally comparitively very low in calories. Cocktails (low-sugar ones) and with mixers are both ok.

4. Dry White Wine

Of the wines, dry whites tend to be the lowest in calories. Most pubs in Britain now not only sell wines, but they even take the time to teach their staff the differences between their wines.

3. Bitter

If you’ve got to have a pint (and remember, nobody is forcing you) then stick with draught bitter. It’s usually significantly lower in calories than lagers and other by-the-pint drinks. Some of them even taste good too.

2. Diet Soda

Diet coke tastes awful. There’s no arguing on this one - it’s dire. However, if you can stomach it (or the myraid of alternative “diet” drinks), it’s very low calorie and you can drink it pretty much guilt-free. There is some debate about whether the aspartame in diet coke is bad for you - you have been warned.

1. Water!

Yup, they sell/serve water in bars and pubs. With ice, with cordials … plenty of options, and all very low calorie. True, it’s not exciting, but most people don’t drink enough water and you could save yourself burning off a serious quantity of calories by replacing just a few beers with water on a regular basis.

Christmas is a tough time for most people, both financially and in terms of health. Too much expense, too much booze, too much food, too many late nights … you have to wonder why we still bother. I’m sure it all use to be fun.

I’ve long thought the people who jet off to a nice beach somewhere have the right idea - avoid the whole thing. But for those of us without a ticket to paradise, there’s still plenty you can do to avoid spending the next couple of weeks hungover and starting the new year with a few extra pounds.

1. Drink Smart!

Between office christmas parties and glass after glass of mulled wine, port, sherry, champagne, you’ll be lucky to avoid some nasty hangovers and awkward moments in the following weeks. You can avoid over-doing it with just a few simple tricks.

First, drink a soft drink to start the evening. Most people are thirsty when they first arrive at a party and so their first drink vanishes quickly. That one will go to your head faster than the others too (which just sets you up for an over-the-top evening). Quench your genuine thirst first, before you start on the alcohol.

Next, alternate your drinks. You’ll still have plenty of alcoholic drinks in the space of a night but you’ll end up keeping yourself better hydrated (alcohol dehydrates you), and drinking slower.

Finally, when you do drink, aim for lower alcohol and/or volume where possible. Drink bottles of beer instead of pints. Half-fill each glass of wine (there’s plenty more).

Chances are that with just those few changes (most of which you’ll barely notice during the evening) you’ll end up drinking a third of the quantity of alcohol you otherwise would. You can still embarrass yourself if you like, but you’ll at least avoid the hangover and so the following day won’t be wasted.

2. Make Time For Yourself

With all of the rushing around, travelling, cooking and last-minute shopping, it’s very easy to forget to take a few minutes to relax. Don’t fill every day up. Most people take time off work around now, so make sure you spend at least a little bit of that on you. Your family will still be there, and still be happy to see you, in January. You don’t have to see everyone in a week!

3. Avoid Financial Stress: Spend Within Your Limits

Nothing will make christmas worse than stress, especially if it’s caused by money worries. If you spend too much, you might well end up worrying about money for the whole of christmas instead of enjoying it and relaxing. Quality time with family is never quality time if your mind is on your finances and you’re stressed because you don’t know how you’ll cope.

There are plenty of ways to spend less on presents, from making them yourself to shopping around for a bargain. Even charity shops can be a help if needed. Spreading the cost out can help, but putting presents on credit cards is disastrous. There are people out there still paying for presents they bought last year. If you need to put it on a credit card, you can’t afford it - buy something else (or nothing at all - friends and family are understanding people).

4. Eat Slowly

You’ll spend a lot of time in the next few weeks with mountains of food in front of you. Plates piled to the ceiling. Enough gravy to swim in. Eat everything put in front of you and you’ll put on a lot of weight in a very short space of time. That’s not too hard to avoid though. Drink a glass of water before you start eating, and talk to the people around you. Chances are your brain will realise you’re full before you finish eating.

If that’s not working, or too much trouble, don’t fall into the trap of trying to undo the damage by making a new year’s resolution to do more exercise. They never work. Instead, look at ways to make sustainable changes to your lifestyle. Those few extra pounds you add in december will go, in time, and you don’t need to do much to make that happen.

5. Get Some Sleep

Between getting up at 5am to cook turkey and going to sleep at 5am after a christmas party, your body takes quite a battering over christmas. You’ll be more active than usual, do more travelling than usual, and eat and drink more than usual. You will most certainly have more late nights and early starts than usual. Make a point of getting a good night’s sleep, every night. If you can’t, then a powernap once in a while will help you avoid feeling lethargic and tired.

Bonus: 6. Pig Out (and Watch TV)

That might sound counter-productive, but as bad as worrying about money over christmas is worrying about your health, counting ever calorie, measuring every drink. It’s a chance to relax, unwind and enjoy yourself, not to put so many limits on yourself you can’t have a good time. Eat, drink and be merry, just try to be smart about it!

There is a new diet fad sweeping America - diet meals delivered, pre-prepared. Essentially, it is a service for those too lazy to put effort into food preparation who also want to lose weight. Apparently, the irony that they are trying to lose weight by expending less energy is lost on the customers of these new services.

Regardless of how sad it may be to rely on a 3rd party to prepare your meals - something most of us have managed to avoid since our teens - and the recent news that people who are thin because of diet rather than exercise may actually be quite unhealthy, there is no doubt that these services are popular. Their success is clearly down to convenience - both in terms of food preparation and calorie counting. As with anything else though, each company is going to be offering a different quality of service for a different price.

Thankfully, Epicurious have put together a comparison of the prices and quality of the top 5 services: The Good, the Bad, and the Unhealthy: Rating Prepared Diet Food.

It’s well worth a read, and it appears that the top two performers, eDiets and Zone, are streets ahead of the competition. Nothing similar seems to exist in the UK yes (as far as I could determine), though it would be surprising if nobody launched a scheme along these lines in the near future.

There’s just no denying it - the worst thing about starting down the road to better health is that it involves, at some point, avoiding a few stops in snack town. For many desk-bound geeks, cutting out the snacks is one of the fastest, easiest and most beneficial things it is possible to do.

Cookies, drinks, chocolate - all these things must be avoided - or at least consumed in serious moderation - if your aim is to trim off a few pounds. Some foods, more than others, must be avoided at almost any cost. These are the most fattening - and also, of course, the very tastiest - of the snacks that I have encountered during my years of slothful decadence. They are the ones that - just occasionally - I shed a nostalgic tear for.

10. Toffee Crisp

12.2g of fat per 44g bar. 227 calories. Takes the equivalent of approximately 12 hours of solid knitting to burn off.

Nestle’s Toffee Crisp is a work of art. Definitely at the “lighter” end of the chocolate bar market, it is composed of crisped rice bound with caramel and encased in a milk chocolate shell.

[Aside: My mouth is actually watering and I’ve only written the first of ten items … not good.]

9. Frazzles

5.8g of fat per pack. 121 calories. If you’re going to snack at all, these might not be a bad choice!

Smiths Bacon flavoured Frazzles are pure class. Let’s face it - anything that tastes like pig is good. Not only that, but these beauties actually taste of bacon - a rare treat among crisps that claim to taste of bacon.

8. Coca-Cola

139 calories per 330ml can. Almost all sugar. Might not sound like much, but for a drink that’s high.

Coke really needs no introduction. Unfortunately, though I know it’s bad for me, I drink it once in a while. It really is something I know I should avoid, but it does taste good. Damn that coke. I tried Diet Coke but that made be want to burn my own tongue so I didn’t have to taste it any more.

7. Cadbury Caramel

2.1g of fat per 50g bar. 240 calories. Not bad for a chocolate snack, that’ll still cost you a couple of hours brisk walking.

Surprisingly the only entrant from the mighty Cadbury on the list, the Caramel is easily the nicest of the Cadbury brand of bars. Each carefully crafted piece of chocolate conceals within itself a lake of caramel. Decadent. Delicious. Mmmm, caramel.

Unfortunately, it seems it is almost impossible to find the original Caramel these days. The only ones I seem to be able to find are the gigantic Dairy Milk with Caramel things. Not nearly as good.

6. Twix

24.4g of fat per 100g bar. 493 calories. That’s a couple of hours on the bike.

Twix from the Mars people is a caramel, cookie and chocolate bar, and an old favourite of mine. You get two sticks per pack (which means a greater surface area of chocolate covering than some comparable snacks), and a classic, honed-to-perfection-over-time taste. Can’t go wrong with Twix.

5. Yorkie

21.5g of fat per 68g bar. 367 calories. You’ll need to spend about an hour chopping wood (or something else equally manly) to use up that many calories.

Nestle’s Yorkie Bars have been going for 31 years. That’s impressive by any standards. You can understand why though - they’re just big chunks of pure chocolate. No messing around. The Yorkie is definitely Man Chocolate. Not for girls.

4. Ben Shaws Cloudy Lemonade

I couldn’t find any nutritional info for this. It seems Ben Shaws, the company, is rather behind the times. Their website is dire, and completely lacking useful content. Never mind though - I buy drinks because they taste nice, not because the manufacturer has a decent site.

A lesser known contender, Ben Shaws Cloudy Lemonade is an older-fashioned lemonade and a perfect drink for a hot summer day.

3. KitKat Chunky Peanut Butter

15.8g of fat per 50g bar. 269 calories. Around an hour of social badminton will counter the effect of one of these beauties.

Nestle’s next entrant in the top is something of a newcomer to the chocolate snack market. What it lacks in history and experience though, it makes up in explosive taste. KitKat was already the UK’s best selling brand of chocolate bar, and this new variation doesn’t stray far from the tried and tested formula. It is simply a KitKat chunky with a layer of peanut butter inside - and it tastes just as great as it sounds.

2. Maryland Cookies

2.6g of fat per cookie. 56 calories. Unfortunately, there are around 18 of these little beauties in a pack, for a mighty 900 calories per pack. To balance that kind of calorific content, you’re looking at 3 solid hours of squash. It is SO worth it.

McVities might have been trying to get themselves into the cookie market recently, but Maryland Cookies from Burton’s Foods still has this market completely sown up. These cookies are made of happiness, dreams and love. And chocolate chips. It is an oft-lamented fact - proven repeatedly in labs - that it is impossible to eat only a portion of a pack. It’s all or nothing.

Also available in - gulp - Double Chocolate.

1. Jaffa Cakes

0.97g of fat per 12g cake. 46 calories. There are 12 in a pack (552 calories, or 2 to 3 hours of running). So if … ok, when … you finish the pack, you have in fact eaten 12 whole cakes.

McVities might not own the cookie market, but that’s only because Jaffa Cakes are not considered cookies - they are cakes. More precisely, they are chocolate-covered sponge cakes with a “smashing orangey bit”, and damn are they tasty.

In 1991 McVities got themselves embroiled in a legal fight with the UK tax man to prove that Jaffa Cakes were actually cakes (which are not subject to VAT) and not cookies (which are). How did they win? They baked a giant one to prove the Jaffa Cakes were simply miniature cakes and not biscuits. Genius.

They, unsurprisingly, also have released variations of the product including Blackcurrant, Lemon and Lime and the awesome “Completely Covered in Chocolate” Jaffa Cakes.

And that’s it for the top 10. If I can last the rest of the day without heading to the nearest shop to pick up a truckload of the above to stuff my face with, it will be nothing short of a miracle.