Have Patience with Food to Lose Weight
Welcome once more to another of these great Top 100 weight loss tips. This post is article number 23 in the series and provides another one of my great tips to help you get back in shape.
This post looks at why you should exercise patience when it comes to food if you really want to lose weight. In fact, this is a great trick to cutting down on unwanted calories!
Weight Loss Food
When an overweight person prepares a meal for themselves, they generally put way too much food on the plate and because they have been conditioned to eat up everything on that plate, they eat too much. And that means they consume too many calories for the amount if exercise they get in order to burn them off.
That results in weight gain, which is usually the opposite of what people want, unless of course they are bodybuilders. In that particular case they will deliberately eat more to facilitate excessive exercise to build muscle bulk.
But few of us are bodybuilders. So for the rest of us, in order to balance the number of calories going in to the number of calories being burned, we need to exercise some control over not just what we eat but also how much we eat at each meal sitting.
Controlling Portion Size
Enter the technique of portion control. This is a neat diet related trick you can use on your self to get you to eat less and it's as easy as anything. And there is a fail-safe that comes with it!
The idea is to put a smaller portion of food on your plate than you would normally. You eat your meal as normal and avoid distractions while you eat if possible. But before getting up and being tempted to heap some more food on the plate because you feel you didn't eat enough, make yourself wait 20 minutes.
That's it! just add that wait time to the end of your meal. Get up from the table and go do something else. Wash up all the dishes and cookery items you just used and put them all away in their places. Clean up the kitchen so it really looks great, or do some housework.
Anything that will take you about 20 minutes after you just ate the sensible portion of food you gave yourself is good for diverting your attention away from eating.
After the 20 minutes is up, see if you still feel hungry. I'll bet you that nine times out of ten, chances are you won't.
Here's the fail-safe. If you do still feel hungry, then go get a little more. But I stress, only a little more. Like in a few small spoonfuls. Not another meal sized heap!
If you can master this technique and not trip yourself up by convincing yourself that you do still feel hungry after the 20 minutes even when you don't, then you will have mastered a big part of the weight loss strategy and be on your way to a slimmer, healthier and better looking body!
100 Weight Loss Tips number 22 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 2 Comments
2 thoughts on "Have Patience with Food to Lose Weight"
Terry says:
That's really great news Vernon. So good to hear that people are actually taking seriously the info in these posts and that they work in the real world, as I've always known from the start!
Vernon says:
Thank you for this valuable post. It changed my view on the way I eat. Before this, I always used to get a huge plateful of food and eat the whole lot as quick as I could. I know it was bad but I couldn't help it because that's what I was used to doing. Now I know better and eat small portions and then do what you said, to wait 20 minutes.
You know what? I was amazed that I actually didn't want to go back and have any more. And I'm noticing my weight is dropping already!
You're a genius!