How to Portion Your Meals to Help You Lose Weight

Portioning your meals is an important part of healthy eating and weight loss. Get started with these tips on How to Portion Your Meals to Help You Lose Weight.

As most people know, portioning your meals is a pretty simple step in any weight-loss or healthy eating regimen. If you are unsure how to go about doing it or don't even know where to begin, this can be a little complicated, especially if you have never really paid attention to portion control before. Gain some knowledge on proper meal portions with these tips on How to Portion Your Meals to Help You Lose Weight.

How to Portion Your Meals to Help You Lose Weight

Educate yourself on proper portion sizes. Many people are shocked when they discover actual portion sizes for various foods- in good ways and bad. Learn about proper portion sizes for various common foods based on type with this easy to understand food portion chart from Heart.org. To help you visualize portion sizes, check out this portion sizes serving chart that uses simple hand symbols from Healthy Eating.

Have the right tools. There are many tools out there that you can get for portioning your meals. If you will be weighing your foods, rather than going by volume, a simple digital kitchen scale is a good purchase. On the other hand, if you like to visualize your portions, this handy plate portion control tool might be more useful for you.

Understand where foods belong in each category. It is a common mistake for some of the foods we eat to be thought of as healthy or belonging in one category of food and not another. This is especially easy to do with fats and starches. For instance, corn and potatoes are starches, not vegetables. Make sure you know which foods belong in which category so you don't accidentally double up on your plate.

Make it easy on yourself. If you find that doing your portioning at each meal is too tedious or inconvenient for you, why not do some portioning beforehand? This is also a good way to do it for snacks. You can portion out and place snacks in the fridge or pantry so they are easy to grab on the go making eating healthier snacks easier. For meals, you can actually portion out your meals weekly and freeze some so you can pull them out as the week goes on.

Make sure to read labels and compare. Often times, we think a portion size is more than it actually is. For example, a sandwich has two servings of grains because each slice of bread is a serving. Make sure you compare label servings with actual recommended servings.

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