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Archive for the ‘Your Diet & Your Body’ Category

Portion Control Today – How Different Were Food Portion Sizes 20 years Ago?

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Have you ever wondered why hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, pizza, and cheesecake are these so much worse for us now than they have been in past years? After all they have been around for a long time. Why do they appear to do more damage and why is the concept of food portion control becoming so important to us?

The answer to this question is related to the general health of our nation. The inclusion of these foods in our diet certainly is impacting on our lives. Obesity in the United States has just become a national epidemic in the past 20 years. Children are not exempt from this catastrophic obesity epidemic in our country. Childhood obesity continues to escalate in all socio-economic populations as children’s understanding of food portion sizes has been determined and controlled by large international food organizations. The marketing departments of these organizations increase the portion sizes of comparatively inexpensive food to increase their sales.

According to registered dietician, Dr Lisa Young, also an MSNBC reporting contributor, ‘When McDonald’s first opened, a soda was 7 ounces. Today, the child size is 12 ounces, a small is 16 ounces, and the large 32 ounces.’

So it’s not the inclusion of these foods in our diet today that is the real problem. Its how much of these foods we consume that’s at the heart of our health crisis. When you compare food portions 20 years ago with today’s extra generous super sized servings it helps to give some idea of the cause of the obesity epidemic in our country. Take a look at the change in caloric intake in foods today compared to 20 years ago below. You’ll be amazed at how different they are and understand how we need something as helpful as portion control to keep a today.

Food Portions Today Compared to 20 Years Ago

Information Source: The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)

Food Item

Calories

1989

Calories Today

Calories

Increase

Spaghetti and Meatballs

500

1,025

525

Cheeseburger

333

590

257

Soda

85

250

165

Turkey Sandwich

320

820

500

Bagel

140

350

210

Pizza

500

850

350

Caesar Salad

390

790

400

Cheesecake

260

640

380

Cookie

55

275

220

French Fries

210

610

400

Pizza

500

850

350

So what can we make from these figures? The outcome is clear. The result is obvious. We are consistently and unwittingly consuming more food than we need. As we do this, we regularly stretch the size of our stomachs and condition our bodies to feel hungry when we should not feel this way. The more we eat like this the greater the likelihood that we will gain weight and the more calories we need to use to burn off excess and unwanted fat. Our desire for oversized food portions of have overpowered our good intentions to exercise more or get fitter.

How can we avoid becoming a victim of mega sized eating?

  • Don’t be seduced by extra large size meals for only 39cents more! Decide how much food you need and only eat that much
  • Find out what size portions of different foods is right for you so you can eat the correct amount of everything you enjoy without gaining weight
  • Learn how portion control eating habits will help you do this as a way of life, and avoid overnight fad diets that generally don’t last much longer than that.

Reclaim Your Health. Start today.

You Can Do It!

Warm Regards

Rowena French

For The Team @MightyDigitalDownloads.com

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight and her family’s health. Tired of dieting without success? Sign up to my free magazine to learn more about how to use portion control for healthy, permanent weight loss. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free product sample, watch my preview video for more information about the whole portion control package.

Can I Eat Portion Control Foods, Lose Weight and Still Keep Healthy?

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

The short answer to this important question is ‘Yes’. The more important response is an explanation of ‘How’ and ‘Why’. Knowing about your body’s needs is important when planning a portion control menu that will help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight. There are four (4) main food groups that supply essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients for your body:

1. Grain and Wheat

2. Dairy and Cheese

3. Vegetables and Fruit

4. Meat, Fish, and Alternatives

One common characteristic of most diets is that they limit or eliminate entire food groups from their menus because they are deemed unhealthy and unpopular at the time. Many diets restrict food groups and minimize the inclusion of nutrients, such as fats and protein, in the dietary plan. This is not the way portion control eating works. Your body requires a variety of essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals found in carbohydrates, proteins, fats, sugars, and water. The secret is knowing where to find these nutrients and how much of each your body needs. Armed with this information you will be well equipped to make sensible decisions about what and how much food you eat.

The inclusion of carbohydrates in any weight loss menu is important because foods containing carbohydrates have essential nutrients for the body and provide a much needed energy supply to the body. There are good and bad carbs. Highly processed carbohydrates typically raise blood sugar levels and eventually lead to that ‘crashing’ feeling you experience once they are processed through the body. Complex carbohydrates are good carbs. They pack the most nutritional value and promote appetite suppression. Brown rice and whole wheat flour are examples of good carbs. These foods are not only valuable sources of energy but an effective means of keeping your rumbling ‘hungry tummy’ quiet much longer.

To remain healthy, your body needs a regular intake of foods containing protein. We can’t afford to do without it because protein is another essential nutrient for the body and is used to create muscle mass, to support healthy cell creation and function, and to strengthen the immune system. Proteins are found primarily in meats, poultry, dairy products, and fish, beans and legumes. Protein is found predominantly in meat (lean is the best by far) and fish. A portion of these foods representing a third of your meal in your portion control meal provides your body with a healthy intake of protein.

Foods containing fats have been deemed unpopular across recent years. They have been reduced or completely excluded from many diet plans. Because fats are important to your diet however they are included in portion control menus, but they should be restricted to between 20 to 35% of your daily intake – targeting less than 30%. There are healthy fats and not-so-healthy fats so it’s important to know the difference. The best source of fats are from meats, oils, nuts, and dairy products. The most important information you need to know when including fats in your eating plan is the foods that contain healthy fats.

Foods containing a group of processed fats known as Transfats need to be avoided or eaten in small portions and only occasionally. They are basically healthy fats that have been hydrogenated to increase their shelf life and flavor. They are found in high percentages of cakes, cookies, and snack foods. Transfats are known to raise LDL (unhealthy cholesterol), levels in the body. High LDL levels can lead to serious heart disease.

Transfats do not contribute to weight loss or the development of a healthy body and their inclusion in your portion control eating plan should be considered carefully. The key is to significantly reduce the amount of saturated fats in your diet and to manage these is to watch the amount of fat you consume from meat and dairy. Make use of low-fat or fat-free choices. Remember it’s often at the store that you make the most important decisions about portion control meals.

Many foods contain fats that are good for your body and are referred to as healthy fats. These fats add to the condition of your skin and hair and need to appear on your menu regularly. Olive oil is a sensible and healthy choice for fats since it contains monounsaturated fat, which reduces the LDL levels in your body and, in turn, lowers your risk of heart disease. It is a healthier choice for fats, especially the lighter extra-virgin olive oil choices and recommended in portion control eating plans. In addition to olive oil, you should also consider canola, peanut, sunflower, and soybean oils. Many of these oils are now used in products such as mayonnaise to make them healthier for you

Portion control eating plans include foods from each of the four major food groups. These choices reflect an understanding of the right kind of foods within some of these categories. You can achieve and keep a healthy body weight through portion control, losing excess weight and most importantly keep it off. By including smaller portions of foods that are more calorific on your menu, you will discover how to make eating an enjoyable way of life rather than another grueling diet. By eating sensible portions of the right foods you will avoid feeling hungry and stay healthy by giving your body everything it needs.

Connie Diekman, Director of Nutrition at Washington University, St Louis has to more to say about how to get healthy and stay healthy using portion control here.

YouTube Preview Image

Warm Regards

Rowena French

For The Team @MightyDigitalDownloads.com

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight and her family’s health. Tired of dieting without success? Sign up to my free magazine to learn more about how to use portion control for healthy, permanent weight loss. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free product sample, watch my preview video for more information about the whole portion control package.

Why Portion Control is NOT about Abstinence

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Portion Control

Whenever you start a new diet you generally discover that at some stage you will need to abstain from at least one food group- which ever one is deemed to be the ‘bad guy’ at the time. The greatest ‘weight gain’ culprits over recent years have been carbohydrates and fats. Portion control eating does not subscribe to abstinence from carbs, fats nor any foods as a means of long term weight loss. Instead it promotes eating the right sized portions of these and all foods.

The benefit of eating carbohydrates as part a weight loss program can be confusing as there are some carbs that should be eaten and others that should not. Highly processed carbohydrates typically raise blood sugar levels and eventually lead to you feeling ‘down’ once they are processed through the body. Complex carbohydrates pack the most nutritional value and promote appetite suppression. Brown rice and whole wheat flour are examples of good carbs and an important component in any portion control menu they will stave off your hunger longer.

The inclusion of fats in your portion control menu is important but the total amount of fat you eat should be monitored and generally less than 30% of your daily food consumption. As is the case with carbs there are healthy fats and not-so-healthy fats so it’s important to know the difference. Fat can be obtained from meats, dairy, nuts, and oils and knowing where to find the healthiest fats is important.

You can eat sugar or artificial sweeteners and still lose weight, it’s just a matter of how much. Using natural sugars may be more satisfying but either source should be used in moderation. Unlike most fad diets portion control eating is not restrictive – it’s a way of life, so there is a place for the inclusion of limited amounts of either natural or artificial sweeteners.

The jury is still out about the value or not of sweeteners in weight loss programs. However, they can be a useful strategy for reducing the amount of sugar in your diet, which does lead to better weight control. The important thing to understand is that the use of real sugar in your diet is not necessarily a bad thing when you practice portion control – unless you are diabetic or have some other illness that prohibits the consumption of sugar.

Take care when you select artificially sweetened drinks as these often contain empty calories and can promote hunger rather than suppress it. There is some value in a limited portion of something sweet rather than continually depriving yourself of a delicious sweet treat or cup of carbonated soda. This generally leads to overeating later. The solution is found in an underlying principle of portion control! A small taste of something calorific is MUCH healthier than prolonged abstinence and then binging.

You can lose weight without abstaining from the foods you really enjoy. Smaller portions of food from every food group Combined with physical activity, is a winning combination! If you eat 100 more food calories a day than you burn, you’ll gain about 1 pound in a month. That’s about 10 pounds in a year. If you reduce the same number of calories seamlessly by managing the size of your food portions through portion control and gradually increase your physical activity you WILL lose those extra pounds and keep them off. All without the agony of abstinence from entire food groups.

Take a look at what Connie Diekman, Director of Nutrition at Washington University, St Louis has to say about how to get healthy and stay healthy using portion control.

.YouTube Preview Image

Warm Regards

Rowena French

For The Team @MightyDigitalDownloads.com

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight and her family’s health. Tired of dieting without success? Sign up to my free magazine to learn more about how to use portion control for healthy, permanent weight loss. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free product sample, watch my preview video for more information about the whole portion control package.

How Calories Loss AND Food Fuel Cause Weight Loss

Friday, February 27th, 2009

How Calories Loss and Food Fuel cause Weight Loss You have probably heard that if you use a smaller number of calories than your body needs for fuel through a calories loss eating program and if you exercise then you will lose weight. It is true, and this is the only way that you will ever successfully enjoy a healthy weight loss and keep this weight off.

Let us say you normally eat about 2,000 calories per day, which is the recommended amount of calories for an average weight adult. If you create a calories loss and cut your daily calories back to 1,500 then your body needs to get that additional 500 calories of energy from somewhere. It will get that additional energy by burning energy from the fat stored in your body.

That will make you lose weight. There are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound of fat so in order to lose five pounds you will need to burn an additional 17,500 calories. That is why it is impossible for those fad diets and trendy diet pills to work like they say they do and why a gradual calories loss through eating a healthy diet is the only way to go.

No pill can ever cause your body to burn that many additional calories. Only restricting your calories in a calories loss menu and forcing your body to burn fat for energy can cause real weight loss. Dieting is about more than just calories though and you need to maintain a sense of balance in your eating program to lose weight and remain healthy.

If you only eat a salad and drink diet sodas for calories, you still won’t lose weight because you are not giving your body what it needs to function. Your diet should not be something that you use to punish yourself or to punish your body. Your body needs food for fuel.

There is no getting around that fact, so you need to change what you give your body for fuel and that is where the common sense part comes in. It is common sense to know that your body needs whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats. Most of us would agree that some of these foods are OK but how do we include them in our diet on a regular basis instead of those high calorie foods we enjoy the most?

It is not always easy to only give your body what it needs when you are craving a juicy, cheesy, greasy burger, but if you want to be healthy, you will choose to skip that burger and replace it with a turkey and salad wholemeal roll. Changes like this are not really about going ‘on’ a diet in the traditional sense. They are about a lifestyle change and creating a calories and this is just a tool to help lose unwanted weight and keep it off.  

Choose to make your health a priority, watching your calorie intake as a guide and instead of punishing your body for being overweight, celebrate your body and feed it so that your body gets strong and healthy. A diet that is rich in whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, hormone free lean meat, and other ingredients combined with regular exercise is the best way, and the only way, to get truly fit and to get your body to the ideal weight.

When you first start a new healthier eating program it can feel awkward, but after you stick with it for a time, it will begin to feel NORMAL. The trick is getting through that period of calories loss ‘change’. Once you accept the change, accept the new routine and start to notice your weight loss it will feel great…like, how did I ever NOT do this before? 

Warm regards

Rowena French

Rowena French

For the Team

mightydigitaldownloads.com

Rowena French knows that the way to good health is through weight loss and exercise. Want to reclaim your body and enjoy long term weight loss watch my video?  Subscribe to my magazine and free report on common sense weight loss. Read my blog to learn more about losing weight permanently and staying healthy through calories loss.

 

Without Portion Control, Weight Loss Didn’t Happen – History Explains!

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Portion Control

High-carbohydrate diets of the 1970’s reflected no understanding of portion control as the way to long term weight loss.  Instead, they encouraged the increased consumption of carbohydrates and decreased the amount of meat and protein portion in a diet. Potatoes flew off the shelves and bread-lovers dove head-first into the crusty, white loaves in the bakery section of supermarkets. Whole-wheat was not even on the radar screen at the time!

But the focus on carbohydrates and reduction of protein was not a long-term answer to weight loss either. Before the craze ended, it was clear that a diet heavy with carbohydrates was not the answer for sustained weight loss, and the focus moved to meats and protein. These became low-carbohydrate diets and they rocked the dieting world again by putting the brakes on carbs!

Diets like this literally reversed the fads of yester-year’s high-carbohydrate diets by saying that bread and pasta and anything white were bad for you and should be eliminated. Once again, the public jumped aboard a new diet fad and lost the critical nutritional value of many carbohydrate foods. They failed to understand that the key to healthy weight loss over the long term is by following a healthy eating plan not a restrictive one through portion control.

The Atkins Diet glamorized the high-fat, high-protein diet and ‘ketosis’ became a household word as millions of people jumped on the dieting roller coaster again! According to Wikepedia, ketosis is ‘a stage in metabolism occurring when the liver converts fat into fatty acids and ketone bodies which can be used by the body for energy.’ Unfortunately, many medical resources consider this a physiological state that is associated with chronic starvation! Scientists and physicians scratched their heads with concern about how this diet would impact the heart’s health in years to come.

There are many ways to lose weight but the key to success is being able to keep it off and maintain a healthy weight. Limiting food types, minimizing calories, and eliminating food groups can help you lose weight quickly. But when you resume your old eating habits, you’ll regain the weight even when you’re just introducing healthy foods back into your meal plans! The secret to losing weight and avoiding weight gain after this is by reducing the amount of food you eat through portion control rather than eliminating them completely.

That’s why you should not deprive yourself of foods you enjoy. You need to learn to manage portion control and know more about what your body needs to stay healthy. It’s clear from history that fad diets are exactly that – FADS! Diets are short-term fixes to a lifelong problem and they often have hazardous health effects in the long-term.

We now know that healthy proportions of carbohydrates, fats, and oils are needed in the diet for healthy weight management. Understanding the value and importance of all types of food groups, vitamins, and nutrients is essential to better managing your health and your weight. Eating all of these in a balanced way through portion control allows your body to react as it should and provides a long term answer to weight loss and maintenance

Don’t think about ‘dieting’. Think instead about eating a healthy portion of foods from each food group. Listen to your hunger signals, and enjoy your food. This is the basis of portion control, the weight loss and weight management secret we can learn from our European neighbors who keep trim without eliminating foods that they enjoy.

Warm regards

Rowena French

Rowena French

For the Team@mightydigitaldownloads.com

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight and her family’s health. Tired of dieting without success? Sign up to my magazine to learn more about how to use portion control for healthy, permanent weight loss. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free product sample, watch my preview video for more information about the whole portion control package.

Food Portions V Diets – You MUST Read This Before Starting a Diet

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Many fad diets quickly gain a massive following because of the rapid weight-loss experience they claim. The Grapefruit Diet of years ago touted spectacular results from eating grapefruit before every meal. Advertising the health benefits and fat-burning potential of grapefruit had dieters scrambling for the produce section! This was truly a ‘one hit wonder’ to the over-weight individual. It restricted the type of food to be eaten and failed to include correct sized portions of the wide range of foods we need to eat to stay healthy.

The Grapefruit Diet is a 12-day diet plan that restricts caloric intake and requires eating a grapefruit prior to every meal. Although it talks about the weight-losing properties of grapefruit, the real weight loss comes from the restriction of calories. Its proponents say that you can lose 10 pounds in 12 days. Sound good? Sure it does, but imagine what happens once you go off the diet as you crave calories and when you ignore the size of your food portions? Rapid weight loss is not a long-term solution.

The Atkins Diet has weathered the diet storms for years and gained popularity in the late 90’s. Then in 2001, the ‘New’ Atkins Diet surfaced and promoted low-carb bars and food products from Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. Unfortunately, this diet still restricts the intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy foods instead of modifying the size of the food portions we eat. Carbohydrates are on the taboo list of The Atkins Diet.

This diet defies everything we have learned from nutritionists and scientists over the years about the importance of a healthy diet, including grain products, vegetables, fruit, dairy, and meat. No single food category provides everything the body needs and the Atkins Diet is no exception.

The South Beach Diet bans fruit, bread, potatoes, pasta, and baked goods during the first phase. You can supposedly lose 13-15 pounds in the first two weeks as you ‘detoxify’ your body. You then add ‘good’ carbs back to your diet and weight loss slows down but continues. And finally, during the last phase of this diet you can eat anything in moderation.

As you can see from the strategy, the first two weeks are really a teaser to get you motivated to diet, but that period of rapid weight loss is unhealthy and can cause serious health issues. The real success comes when you re-incorporate all food groups back into your dietary plan and exercise portion control.

The Zone is a very complex diet plan that requires weighing, measuring, and calculating percentages of food groups consumed each day. It is time consuming to manage and becomes frustrating and difficult to maintain. Although the recommended proportions of food groups consumed are healthy, the process is difficult to maintain. Modifying the size of your food portions from the beginning would be much healthier and far less complicated.

As unlikely as this may sound, dieting in an attempt to control weight is often associated with weight gain. Those people who diet, generally gain more weight than those who never restrict. Healthy weight management means following a healthy meal plan, not a restrictive one and can be achieved through portion control.

You can reach the same weight loss goal as each of these ‘diets’ just by controlling the size of the food portion you eat. Losing weight can happen naturally and healthily not unnaturally when you feel deprived and unhappy. Best of all it can include the right sized portions of the all the food types you should eat and like to enjoy.

Do you remember another Weight Loss journey that you embarked upon that just did not worked for you (or probably anyone else) over the long term? I’d love to hear from you about these as well as and any weight loss success of your own or by others.

Warm regards

Rowena French

For the Team @MightyDigitalDownloads.com

 

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight and her family’s health. Tired of dieting without success? Read more about the benefits of portion control in my other blog posts. Sign up to my free magazine to learn more about how to modify your food portions for healthy, permanent weight loss. If you haven’t already subscribed to my free product sample, watch my preview video for more information about the whole portion control package.

 

Food Portions, a Successful Alternative to Boring Diets that Fail

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Dieting to reach a healthy weight and keeping this same weight over time is not as straight forward as it may seem. Many diets offer to do this. The South Beach Diet, Nutri-System, Jenny Craig, and a multitude of other dieting options bombard the airwaves and can confound the issues. No wonder people feel that their weight loss and management is out of control.  Those of us who struggle with our weight, need a new, less complex perspective on food, one that is focused on the portions or the amount of food we eat. We need to eat our way towards a healthy life, one portion at a time.

There is a way to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight over the long term.  To do this you need to recognize those things that sabotage your ability to lose and maintain this weight. As you do this you will discover that a healthy weight is not exclusively about deprivation. It is about discovering a way to eat the foods you enjoy and not gain weight. Establish these healthy, life-long habits and you will eliminate ‘weight-worry’ from your daily life.

We know that the best eating plan or diet is whatever works best not just at the start, but over time. Looking for a quick-fix is only temporary. Depriving yourself of the things you love to eat is a short term fix to the problem. But learning to manage your food portions and control how much you eat is the key to long-term weight control.

Including the foods you enjoy eating on your menu will actually help you lose and maintain your weight! Even creamy soups, pasta smothered in cheese and sauce, and crusty buttered rolls can all be part of your menu when you eat them occasionally and in proper portions. The secret to doing this is at the heart of life-long weight loss.

Believe it or not, you can reach your healthy weight goal and enjoy the benefits of this for good by eating the foods you love. As you develop this aspect of your new healthy lifestyle you will dispel the many myths and misconceptions about food.  Investigate carefully the limitations of diets containing foods with fat burning capacities that are guaranteed to cause rapid weight loss. Food has changed over the past 20 years and the value of organic or natural food choices in your menu is important for you to understand too. Eating these healthy foods and eating smart in correct portions is the way forward.

Using all the information you gather about correct food portions, you will be able to plan meals that will reflect sensible portion control and help you move towards better nutrition and a healthier body. Learn to eat well rather than continue on the yo-yo dieting roller-coaster. Join the world of eating for enjoyment and discover ways to manage your weight while still indulging your senses with the right sized portions of the food you love!

Warm regards

Rowena French

For the Team @MightyDigitalDownloads.com

Rowena French uses responsible portion control to successfully manage her own weight. Tired of dieting without success? Change your food portions. My free gifts show you how portion control replaces dieting. Read my blog, watch my free preview!

 

How to Savor a European Serving Size While You Lose Weight

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Europeans seldom indulge in fast-food as frequently as Americans do. Until recently fast food hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes were non-existent in Europe. As America’s fast-food giants expanded into new markets and spread across the world, the waist-lines of Europeans began to spread too. The influence of the excessive serving size in the western world has had negative effects on our European relatives who have managed their weight through careful portion control for centuries.

Another secret to weight control for Europeans is their ability to savor and enjoy their food serving size. Eating in European countries is an enjoyable and leisurely experience. Rather than grab a fat and calorie laden meal at the drive-through and eat on the road, they take time to find pleasure in eating.

They make it a priority to relax at meal times and enjoy the smell, texture, and taste of food. Meals are lighter and leisurely eaten, which assist them feel full and this gives the brain time to signal to their body that it has had enough food. Meal-time is a time to enjoy fellowship with friends and family. It is not a hectic, hurried experience, but a time to slow down and truly enjoy the tastes of food.

Savoring your food is much more satisfying in Europe as they experience the true flavors and combinations of food. Americans can learn a lot from the European people, who exercise self-control and manage their healthy serving size as a part of their everyday lives. Whether they are eating a leisurely meal with friends and family, enjoying a fast food meal, or preparing delicious home-cooked meals, they are always aware of what they eat.

So remember the European Secrets to portion control as your consider your serving size at meal times. Eat smaller portions of all the foods you enjoy. Indulge occasionally in a limited way. Take the time to savor the taste of food at meal time and enjoy the wonderful ritual that eating should be.

Warm regards

Rowena French

For the Team

MightyDigitalDownloads.com

Rowena French uses portion conrol to successfully manage her own weight. Tired of dieting without success? Change the serving size of your food. My free gifts show you how portion control replaces dieting. Read my guide, listen to my audio book!

The Secret Benefits of a European Serving Size

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Have you ever wondered how European men and women control their weight better than Americans through their serving size at each meal? France is well-known for pastries dripping with sweetness and croissants and rolls lathered with hot buttery goodness. And who has not salivated over European desserts rich in sugary coatings, or marveled at the French consumption of red wine?

But Europeans are also known for their well-maintained weight. How do they do it? It is all about portion control. Food portion sizes in France and other European countries are very different from the United States. A ham sandwich serving size in France for example, consists of a couple of thinly sliced pieces of ham, fresh tomatoes, and spicy mustard on a baguette.

Compare that to the sandwich from your local deli, which has thick, heavy layers of ham, piles of cheese, mayonnaise or special sauces, and thick, hearty hoagie bread! The American version of a sandwich also comes with a heaping pile of potato chips or french fried potatoes! When a serving size like this is just for a sandwich it is no wonder that Americans are leading the world in obesity!

Europeans know how to say No to large portions and large meals. Although they do indulge in decadent desserts and rich food occasionally, they eat smaller portions of everything. Rather than consume a buttered croissant in one sitting, they will have half a croissant or a small, petite portion of a rich dessert.

They practice self-control and manage their portions of food responsibly. Successful self-control leads to successful portion control. By restricting their serving size whenever they eat, Europeans enjoy the benefits of eating any food they want and restricting their calorie intake to avoid gaining weight. Want to lose weight and keep it off? Consider this approach!

Warm regards

Rowena French

For The Team

MightyDigitalDownloads

Rowena French uses portion control to successfully manage her own weight. Tired of dieting without success? Change the serving size of your food. My free gifts show you how portion control replaces dieting. Read my guide, listen to my audio book! 

 

3 Pitfalls You CAN Steer Clear of in a Calories Loss Diet

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Dieting is no fun for people who set themselves up to fail, when they start a new diet and then tumble right into one or more of the most common dieting pitfalls. Recognizing these pitfalls and learning how to avoid them can mean the difference between staying on track with your diet or falling back into your old, unhealthy eating patterns. So, avoid the traps below and start your calories loss diet the right way, enjoying a healthy weight loss that will be a welcome part of your lifestyle.

Making radical changes to your eating habits happens all the time on diets, especially fad diets. If you go on a diet where you can only eat fruit, or only eat protein, or you must cut out all of one of kind of food it will be very difficult for you to stay on that diet. When you make changes to the way you eat you should make them gradually. If you make an extreme change to the way you eat and you do it fast then you will deprived and you will start to crave foods, making it more likely that you will go off your diet.

Setting unrealistic goals is tempting especially as, when you first start dieting, you might lose anywhere from five to ten pounds in the first couple of weeks. When that happens, of course you feel like the diet is great and you want that kind of weight loss to continue but most of the time early weight loss is all water weight. Real weight loss does not happen that fast. Experts say a healthy rate of weight loss is one to two pounds per week. So if you tell yourself that you want to lose ten pounds a week every week you are setting yourself up for disappointment. If you begin to feel disappointed and believe you are failing on your calories loss diet, you are more likely to give up on it and go back to your unhealthy lifestyle.

Using food as a reward is a real pitfall to be avoided because one of the most common ways that we all reward ourselves is food. How many times have you told yourself ‘I stuck to my calories loss diet all week so one cheeseburger will not hurt me’? Well that cheeseburger will hurt you. In the long run, it will be just more calories that you need to burn off. Instead of rewarding yourself with food for a job well done, take the same amount of money that you would have spent on a food treat and spend it on a new blouse, a new lipstick, a book, a new CD, or something else that will motivate you to keep going on your weight loss journey.

Warm regards

Rowena French

For The Team

mightydigitaldownloads.com

Rowena French has lost weight and wants you to warn you of dieting pitfalls. Tired of falling into traps on your diet? Want to reach your weight loss goals? My free gifts show you how calories loss is the simple answer. Read my guide, listen to my audio book!