Eating Smaller Portions: Painless Tips & Strategies

Eating smaller portions is an important part of any weight loss plan, but sometimes it’s challenging to do so. You’re hungry, you want to eat enough to feel satisfied, but those little servings of food on your plate seem too skimpy.

Here are some painless ideas for eating smaller portions while still feeling satisfied:

Eat More Vegetables
First, remember that vegetables are your best friends!  It’s the one food group that you can eat substantial portions of, while ingesting relatively few calories.

For example, imagine eating a meal of lean chicken breast, vegetables and brown rice.  Three ounces of chicken breast has less than 150 calories; and 1/2 cup of brown rice has 110 calories.  Now add vegetables:  1 cup of broccoli has less than 60 calories; 1 cup of cauliflower has approximately 30 calories.  That’s only 350 calories for a lot of food!  That would certainly fill up your plate and your tummy, right?  Filling half of your plate with vegetables and taking smaller servings of other foods is a great way to eat fewer calories and still feel satisfied.

See: Top 5 Healthy Dark Green Vegetables

Fool Yourself — In a Good Way!
Using a smaller plate is also helpful, because you won’t see a lot of empty space on a large dinner plate.  Take a dessert plate or a soup bowl and eat your meals from it.  Again, fill it up with vegetables and only smaller portions of other foods.

See: A ‘Handy’ Way to Size Up Your Portions

What’s Stopping You?
Last but not least, it can also be helpful to figure out exactly why you struggle with eating smaller portions.  What about it do you fear?  What makes you uncomfortable?

Try this experiment: at your next meal, take only one small spoonful of each food, and only a 2-inch serving of meat (approximately 1 ounce).  Look at the skimpy amount of food on your plate and say to yourself, “This is all I’m going to eat for this meal.”

Then pay close attention to how you feel.  Do any thoughts or feelings come up?  Most likely, you’ll start thinking things like this:  “I can’t eat only this much food!  I’ll be starving again in an hour!  I need to eat more than this!  I don’t want to be hungry!”  Whatever thoughts and feelings come up, write them down.  Then you’ll have a pretty good idea of the reasons why you overeat.  Most often, they will be fears about not having enough, going without, or feeling deprived.

See: Keep a Journal For Progress

(Remember, the above is only an experiment to generate your feelings about eating smaller portions. After the experiment, be sure to serve yourself a proper portion of food suitable for your calorie needs for that meal.)

Work through these fears by reminding yourself that you’ll always have enough food to eat.  Open your kitchen cupboards and look at all the food available to you.  Imagine the grocery store, loaded with delicious foods that you can buy and eat at any time.  Once you’ve dismantled the fear of scarcity, you will no longer feel compelled to eat as much as you can NOW – you’ll know that eating smaller portions is okay because food will always be available to you when you need it.

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