Healthy Habits: Ending Portion Distortion

Bad habit: Feast or Famine

There seem to be so many "reasons" to over-eat...

• Maybe you were praised for cleaning your plate & being a "good eater" as a kid...
• Maybe you'd offend the "chef" if you didn't have a huge serving and then seconds to boot... 
• Maybe it's a holiday or the weekend or a nice restaurant and that's "just how you eat on these occasions..."
• Maybe the food is simply delicious and you're listening to your taste buds instead of your stomach... and on and on...

I developed some terrible habits in my teenage years. I'd stay up too late reading or watching TV and then sleep late the next morning. In the mad rush to get dressed and ready for the carpool, guess what got skipped for about 6 years .... Breakfast!

And guess what was forgotten many of those mornings .... lunch money!

On a good day, I'd scrape together a couple quarters from the bottom of my backpack or locker and buy a few morsels of fat or sugar from the vending machine. By the time I got home at the end of the school day, I was famished!

This was a vicious cycle of starving all day and then binge eating that afternoon or evening. I would go without food until my stomach ached and then eat until my stomach ached. What a mess!

What I regret the most was the way I distorted my idea of what a decent portion of food should be. I warped my ability to tell when normal hunger was satisfied and swapped it for a determination to eat until I was stuffed. If I didn't eat 'til I was stuffed then a little voice in the back of my mind seemed to say, "You're gonna be SO hungry later."

Nutritionist Zonya Foco helped me the most in addressing my feast or famine mentality. She has a program called D.I.E.T. F.R.E.E. that teaches eight life changing habits that will improve your health and help you lose weight. Four of the eight habits dealt with the problems I just described.

See if you can guess which healthy habits made the difference...

Drink Water
Include Breakfast
Eat Often
Tame Your Sweet Tooth
Find the Fat
Replace Processed Food with Wholesome
Eat Until No Longer Hungry
Every Day Exercise

I knew it was important to include breakfast. Since I have children who are hungry first thing in the morning, I had already remedied this problem as an adult. It really works wonders. People who eat breakfast will typically consume 100 fewer calories a day than those who don't. That's 36,500 fewer calories per year. It adds up - or should I say - It sheds pounds!

My bad habits had me thinking that I was always starving, but I began to realize that I was seriously neglecting my bodies needs for fluids. I ate and ate, but drank very little. So I started drinking more water. I couldn't believe how much that helped. I also started using it as a tool to help me control my appetite during a meals. If I was feeling especially hungry before a meal, I tried to drink a large glass of water (about two cups) before sitting down to eat. It took the edge off my feelings of starvation and helped me focus on more reasonable portions. Water is SO important for our bodies! Zonya has said that some people actually don't EAT very much but the drink a ton of calories. She estimates that some people could lose up to 50 pounds in a year if they simple switched from soda, coffee, juice, & alcohol to good old water. It would also cut out masses of sugar and harmful chemicals from their diets and clean their body systems instead.

Breakfast and water helped, but two of Zonya's other habits were TOTALLY new to me.

Eat often? Really?

How was I supposed to lose weight if I was eating often? And then I stopped to think about the times of day that I was actually hungry. I feel hungry around 7 am, 11am, 3pm and 6 pm.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner seemed to work their way into 3 of those times, but what was I doing at 3 o'clock? That's right, I was hunting through the house for chocolate, cookies or some other pick-me-up junk that made feel guilty right after I ate it.

What would happen if I gave myself PERMISSION to eat at 3 o'clock? What if I PLANNED to eat something then, if needed? Permission and planning opened up all kinds of possibilities for that time of day. I wasn't going to try to force myself to stay hungry until dinner, and then breakdown and eat anything I could get my hands on. I was going to acknowledge my hunger and plan a healthy snack.

Part of Zonya's "eat often" habit is to include a fruit or vegetable at every meal or snack. In fact at that time of day, she recommends a serving of fruit and a large glass of water to satisfy the hunger, tame the sweet tooth, and keep you going until dinner. She says it will work about 80% of the time, and I've found that to be true. Sometimes I need a little something more, but by giving myself permission to "eat often" I look for something healthy instead of scrounging up junk.

The other new concept for me was "eat until no longer hungry." Well what does that mean? When I ate a meal, I usually asked myself, "Am I FULL? Am I FULL yet?" I was looking for that stuffed to the gills feeling when my body would scream, "Stop already!" But now I started asking myself a new question, "Am I still hungry?" It took me a while to tune out my taste buds and the endorphins I liked from food and tune into my stomach. However, I finally recognized that I was no longer HUNGRY after eating a significantly smaller amount of food than what I usually ate. It's such a simple but powerful question... "Am I STILL HUNGRY?"

These habits compliment each other so well! I'm no longer terrified of being SO HUNGRY later, because I've given myself permission to eat often but EAT BETTER. Whether you're counting calories, or weight watchers "points," or whatever, these habits are incredibly helpful.

I started looking at labels to see what the recommended serving size was and realized that I was almost always eating more than 1 portion. So, I focused on eating the recommended serving size and seeing how I felt. "Was I still hungry?" If the answer was no, then it was time to stop eating and move on with life, but if the answer was yes, then I turned to fruit or vegetables to fill the gap.

I've also incorporated other tools to help me get my portions right. I asked for the EZ Weight Plate for my birthday a few years ago. It's a plastic plate with 4 compartments with built in measurement lines. It's helpful for a number meals, but it doesn't work for everything, and it's pricey.

So, I also bought several sets of measuring cups from the dollar store - cheap and simple. When I set pans and serving bowls on the table for a meal, I just use a measuring cup as the serving utensil. It removes the guess work. I don't have to look at the mystery-sized scoop and wonder, "Is this a 1/2 a cup?" And I've taken the the time to determine the dimensions of other serving utensils like my soup ladle. I now know it holds 3/4 of a cup. No more guessing - or kidding myself - about portions.

And the nice thing is that certain portions are pretty repetitive. For example, when losing weight I knew that a 1/2 cup serving of whole grains was all I NEEDED for a meal ... 1/2 cup of brown rice, or 1/2 cup of whole wheat pasta, etc. Those measuring cups sure came in handy! I still use them as serving spoons.

You know that phrase, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach." I think the key is to PLAN the portions you know you should eat, so you're not letting your eyes and your emotions determine your portion sizes without rational thought. If you know that the restaurant serves twice as much food as you need, then order the to-go box with the meal, so you can pack up half of the food and put it out of site before you begin. You don't need to feel deprived because you didn't eat the second half right now... NO... you just got a fabulous lunch for tomorrow! With a little forethought and planning I can save myself from my worst self.

So let's see if I can sum up this lengthy post...

• Plan your portions.
• Use simple ways to measure them.
• Eat Breakfast.
• Eat Often (and always include a fruit or vegetable.)
• Eat until NO LONGER HUNGRY.

The scriptures say, "all wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature and use of man - all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving." (Doctrine & Covenants 89:10-11)"be diligent and temperate," (Alma 38:10) and "every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things" (1 Cor. 9:25.)  However, prudence, thanksgiving, diligence and temperance seem to take a long time to learn, so let's be patient with ourselves. These good new habits have been the most difficult for me to learn, but the good news is, I AM still learning.