Chapter 19: Weight-Proof Your Portion Control Safe Zone

Strategies 53–66 

Maybe you’ve had a morning that runs something like this:
You overslept, you are in a hurry, and you are hungry. You
pop two pieces of bread in the toaster and you think cereal.

Cereal is fast and yummy and almost healthy too. You grab a box of
cereal from your many options. It’s one of the sweeter choices, but it
tastes awesome and you deserve it on such a horrible morning. Next,
you pull down any old bowl off your shelf and completely fill the bowl
with cereal. Then you take milk from the fridge and pour it to the brim.
Ah, the toast is done. You slather on some butter. To make breakfast
complete and healthy, you top it off with fruit.

This scene is replayed every morning across America. The details may
change a bit, but the end is the same: overeating. What’s wrong with this
breakfast, you may ask. It’s just cereal, toast, and fruit. That’s good, isn’t it?
Let’s run the numbers. How many calories do you think are in our example
breakfast? A few hundred? What if I said it’s closer to 1,000 calories? Would
you be shocked? How can it be so many calories? Because your portions are
much bigger than you think. Let’s see why.

The bowl you are using is probably a big salad bowl which, surprisingly,
is for salad, not cereal. You want to eat a lot of salad so it’s a fine bowl for
salad, but not for cereal or ice cream or spaghetti or most anything else you
eat from a bowl.

You will almost always fill the bowl to the top and eat the whole bowl,
which is probably 2 cups of cereal. The box says one serving only has a pleasant
sounding 120 calories, but a serving is only ¾ of a cup. You are eating a lot
more than one serving. For two cups of cereal you are eating 300 calories!

Next the milk. Covering the cereal probably takes one cup of milk. A cup
of 2% milk is 122 calories. A cup of whole milk has 146 calories but let’s say
you are using 2% milk. So now your breakfast total is 422 calories.
Two pieces of toast has about 200 calories. Your breakfast now comes in
at a total of 622 calories.

A tablespoon sized pat of butter has about 100 calories. So that’s 200
calories worth of butter for two pieces of toast. Breakfast now weighs in at a
hefty 822 calories. But wait, there’s more.

Let’s say you have about 1½ cups of fruit. That’s 150 calories.
Your grand total for this very common and normal sounding breakfast
is 972 calories!

For a woman that means you’ve unwittingly consumed nearly half your
calories for the entire day at breakfast! Let’s assume snacks, lunch, and dinner
follow a similar pattern and you eat more than you expect at those meals
too. What’s the result? Overeating and weight gain.

What can you do? Practice perfect portions: stay within your calorie
budget by eating the right amount of food at every meal.

Let’s look at breakfast again using more perfect portion sizes. Let’s switch
to a lower calorie cereal choice that has 120 calories per one cup serving. It’s
still tasty, but it’s a bit healthier than the other cereal. Two cups is a lot of cereal;
eating one cup of cereal is a more appropriate serving size. That means you
are only spending 120 calorie on cereal.

Less cereal means less milk, about ½ cup of 2% milk is 61 calories. A lower
calorie move would be to use non-fat milk for only 42 calories.

Two pieces of toast with butter is a lot. Instead, try eating ½ an English
muffin at 63 calories topped with sugar free jam at 10 calories.
Half the fruit is still a nice portion. That’s ¾ cup of fruit at 75 calories.
Your breakfast now totals a more reasonable 328 calories. Remember, the
first breakfast came in at 972.

If your daily calorie budget is 2,000, you still have nearly 1,700 calories
to eat for the rest of the day, which is more than enough for satisfying meals
and snacks.

Let’s take a look at how much weight you’ll gain by eating bad breakfast
number one. The difference between the two breakfasts is 644 calories. You’ll
gain over an extra pound a week just by eating the more caloric breakfast!

What’s going on? You probably have almost no idea how many calories
you are eating each day. The reasons are simple, as we read in the threats.
People are horrible at estimating how many calories are in a meal, even experts
are horrible at it. And our plates and bowls make it all too easy to eat too much
food. You will naturally fill a bowl to the top with cereal and you will just as
naturally eat the whole bowl. The sizes involved almost don’t matter. And
because you’ve probably come to think of larger portion sizes as natural, you
may not think twice about eating larger portions.

What’s really interesting, as we learned in the threats, you won’t feel any
fuller from eating the larger, more caloric breakfast. You would feel just as
satisfied eating the smaller, less caloric breakfast. Does practicing perfect
portions seem like a useful skill to learn now?

Can’t you always just eat more food?

Perhaps you’ve been convinced that all that stands between you and
diet heaven is portion control. And that’s partly right. Portion control battles
with exercise for the top title of the best way to successfully lose weight and
maintain weight loss. Some studies show portion control as the most important
factor, others show exercise as the most important. Let’s just say both
are important.

Portion control is probably the most difficult strategy to learn, because
your body doesn’t want to control your portions. It wants you to eat as much
good tasting food as you can. Overcoming that diet-busting instinct takes
some work.

Some people question the effort at portion control altogether. The common
response to portion control is: can’t I always just eat more food? I don’t
have to stop at a given portion size.

Yes, you can always eat more. Nothing ever stops you from eating more.
Nothing. If you want to hijack a candy truck and eat 10,000 candy bars a day
for a week—you can.

But that’s not how you create your perfect diet. Your perfect diet can’t
assume that strategies always work because nothing always works. Instead,
we are trying to get the probabilities to line up in your favor. We anticipate
what will most likely happen and how we can get what is most likely to happen
to go our way instead of against us. Right now portions go against you.

That can change. Portions can work for you and become one of your most
powerful Safe Zones.

With portion control, this means ensuring that most of the time you eat
an amount of food close to what you need. And if you should eat more, hopefully
your exercise strategies will be enough to overcome the difference.

Over a lifetime, if you can shift the balance so your portions are in line
with your calorie budget, you’ll be able to lose weight. I think you can do
that much, if not more, with the portion control strategies presented in this
chapter.

The goal is to always serve yourself the right amount of food. How do you
know how much that is?

1. Figure out how many calories you need each day. You’ve already
done this in the How Many Calories Can You Eat Each Day? strategy.
As you eat, keep a mental ticker in the back of your mind about how
many calories you have eaten. Your mental ticker tells you when
you are crossing over into weight gain territory and then you can do
something about it. If keeping a mental ticker doesn’t work for you,
then keep a food diary of what you eat. This will allow you to calculate
how many calories you’ve eaten. And if keeping a food log is
more than you want to do, then keep a general feeling for if you are
eating too much, just enough, or not enough. This feeling, though
not perfectly accurate, may be enough to create a bright red stop
light in your mind, telling you if you should eat or not.

2. Learn to figure out about how many calories you are eating.
The goal of this step is not to turn you into a calorie counting
maniac. Few people can count calories every day over the long
run. You just need to develop a good feeling for approximately how
many calories are in the foods you are eating. The Honest Calorie
Estimation Method strategy will show you how to estimate portion
sizes and calorie counts.

3. Decide on your perfect portion size. A perfect portion has as
many calories as you are willing to spend on whatever you are
eating. Typically, the ideal portion is considered to be 3 ounces
of meat. In contrast, I suggest that you have as much meat as you
want as long is matches your calorie and nutritional goals.

How do you know how many calories you have to spend on a portion of
food? From steps 1 and 2. In step 1, you track how many calories
you have eaten so you know how many calories you have left to
spend. And in step 2, you learn how to judge the calorie content of
a meal, so you can decide how much to eat based on the number
of calories you have available and the number of meals you have
left to eat. If you want to eat 6 ounces of meat and it fits within
your goals, then that is a perfect portion.

4. Learn different strategies for creating your Portion Control Safe
Zone. Once you know how much food you can eat, you’ll need to
learn the strategies to help you not slip-up and eat more than you
think you should. You’ll find many strategies for creating perfect
portions in this chapter.

After practicing perfect portions for a while, you shouldn’t have to count
calories at all. Your portions will be close to the appropriate size, and you’ll
be able to control your weight without too much effort.

You don’t have to be exact in all your portions. Small weight changes
become obvious with the daily and weekly feedback mechanism you created
in the Designer Way. When you start to gain weight, be more careful about
your portion sizes, look for new portion control strategies, and get better at
the strategies you are practicing. With this approach, you put yourself back
in control of your weight.

❚ Example: Using the Portion Control Strategies

Let’s run through an example of how you might apply the portion control
strategies in your daily life. This example will be in the form of a conversation
between Coach, our portion control expert, and Annie, someone worried
about controlling her eating during a long road trip.

Annie: I don’t know if I want to go on this trip.
Coach: What’s wrong?

Annie: I gained so much weight while my family was over.
It’s amazing how fast it came back on.
Coach: You don’t have to be afraid. Let’s see how we can use
a few strategies to help you control your weight

Annie: I know, but I’ve failed so many times in the past. I don’t
think it will work.

Coach: That was before you knew how to control your weight.
All you had before were a bunch of marketing slogans.
People telling you to “eat less and exercise more” and
“stop eating when you are full” isn’t very helpful.
With the strategies you can help make sure you won’t
overeat.

Annie: OK, let’s give it a try. I think I’ll have to run the spin
more often while on the road so my weight doesn’t get
out of hand.

Coach: You have your daily weight feedback techniques like
how your clothes fit, trying on a belt, how you look in
the mirror. You don’t necessarily need to run a spin
more often. When any of these tell you that you’re
gaining weight, you can make some moves to tighten
things up a bit.

Annie: OK, that makes sense.

Coach: Have you calculated your calorie budget?

Annie: Yes, it’s 1,600 calories.

Coach: Did you decide how you were going to spend your
calorie budget on meals? Are you going to eat many
small meals during the day or eat three meals a day
with snacks?

Annie: I’ll like three meals a day with snacks.

Coach: How do you want to spend those calories on breakfast,
lunch, dinner, and snacks?

Annie: I need about 800 calories for a good dinner. So that
leaves about 300 for breakfast, 300 for lunch, and 200
for snacks during the day.

Coach: Sounds good. If that doesn’t work out, you can always
make adjustments later. How about we use breakfast as
an example of applying the portion control strategies?
Let’s start with an important first question. Are you
someone who does better eating breakfast or not?

Annie: I don’t usually eat a big breakfast, but we’ll be on the
road and my husband likes a good one, so I’ll probably
eat with him.

Coach: What do you to have?

Annie: I usually have two eggs, toast, and hash browns.

Coach: How many calories is that?

Annie: I don’t really know.

Coach: But if you eat a breakfast without knowing how many
calories you are eating, how do you stick to your calorie
budget? Why don’t you try the using The Honest Calorie
Estimation Method strategy to figure out how many
calories you’ll be eating?

Annie: Two eggs have about 160 calories plus the calories in
the fat used to cook them. Two pieces of toast with
butter has about 300 calories. The hash browns are
harder to estimate. I’ll guess about 200 calories plus
calories for the fat used to cook the hash browns. Plus,
I’ll usually get an orange juice and that’s about 100
calories for an 8 ounce glass. So my usual breakfast
probably has more than 700 calories! Holy cow! That’s
almost half my calorie budget just for breakfast.

Coach: That’s the power of estimating calories. You know when
you are getting in trouble and you can do something
about it before real damage is done. So, what do you
think you can do to meet your calorie budget?

Annie: What are my options?

Coach: All the strategies in this book! But your basic options
are: select it, raise it, skip it, change it, doggy bag it, or
share it. “Select it” means select a correctly portioned
meal from the start. “Raise it” means increase your
calorie budget so you can afford a larger breakfast.
“Change it” means change what you are planning
to eat so it has fewer calories. “Skip it” means don’t
eat breakfast. “Doggy bag it” means you put the food
you don’t want to eat in a doggy bag. “Share it” means
share a meal with a friend.

Annie: On the road, there’s no way to know how much food I’ll
be served so selecting the right portions from the start
won’t work. And I don’t want to increase my calorie
budget for breakfast. And I don’t want to skip breakfast.
I’ll have to figure out something else to do.

Coach: That’s good. You are considering your options. With a
little thought, you can still enjoy a fun, tasty breakfast
without going off your diet. You don’t have to give in
and eat everything or nothing.

Annie: But if I’ve paid for the food I should eat all of it!
Coach: So, no matter how much food they serve you, you’ll
eat it all?

Annie: Well, I guess not. That could be a lot of calories.

Coach: Exactly. You can’t ever control how much food you’re
served, but you can control how much you eat. What
are some of your other options?

Annie: I could change my breakfast. I could eat poached eggs
on toast. I like that and it’d get rid of the butter. Or
maybe I could eat just one piece of toast and use sugar
free jelly instead of butter. I could have fruit instead
of hash browns. Or maybe I could have a few hash
browns. I don’t like any of these options. I’m paying
good money for a breakfast I am not eating and that I
don’t want to save for later. And most of the changes I
make don’t bring down the calorie total by much. Yet
I want to eat breakfast with my husband. Argh!

Coach: It’s tough to have a satisfying breakfast for only 300
calories.

Annie: My husband and I could share breakfast. He doesn’t
need a full breakfast either because it has so many
calories. Maybe I can just have some of his breakfast?
We’ll split the toast and hash browns, I can have some
of his eggs, and I’ll drink tea instead of orange juice.
It might work.

Coach: Well done. You’ve managed to stay on your diet and
meet all your goals.

Annie: But I am afraid it won’t work. My husband may not get
enough food, I may not get enough, and we’ll have to
agree on what to order.

Coach: That’s true. It may not work. But at least try. If it doesn’t
work you can always try something else. Maybe you can
share part of a breakfast and order a side of eggs?

Annie: That might work. We’ll give it a shot. We’ll find something
that works. Thanks, Coach.

This scenario shows the give and take involved in creating a weight control
solution that balances all your goals and concerns. For the rest of this chapter,
I will talk about a variety of useful portion control strategies.

These are the strategies in this chapter: 

Strategy 53. Servings vs. Portions

Strategy 54. The Honest Calorie Estimation Method

Strategy 55. Decide Exactly How Much You’ll Eat Before Taking the First Bite

Strategy 56. Start with Soup or Salad

Strategy 57. Ask for a Doggy Bag Immediately

Strategy 58. Split Meals with a Friend

Strategy 59. Use Meal Replacements

Strategy 60. Try Pre-Prepared Meals Instead of Cooking

Strategy 61. Use Smaller Plates and Bowls

Strategy 62. Break Up Food into Smaller Packages

Strategy 63. The Goody Rules

Strategy 64. Don’t Eat from a Container

Strategy 65. Don’t Bring Serving Dishes to the Table

Strategy 66. Trick Yourself into Eating More Healthy Food