Super-Sly Ways to Slim Down Your Portions

Super-Sly Ways to Slim Down Your Portions

1. Use a smaller bowl and think of them as standard size. Who came up with bowl sizes anyway? They’re hardly suited to everyday portion sizes. If you start small, you’ll end up eating less, AND you can be one of those ultra-positive people and think “my bowl of ice cream is full to the max!” instead of “I have one lowly scoop of Chunky Monkey in here, OMG so deprived.”
2. Start with half. Of course it’s okay to have an entire bagel, but only toast one half to start. After you’re finished, if you’re still hungry, go ahead and toast the other half if you want to, no problem. Starting with half just prevents you from wasting food or feeling guilty if you do in fact end up full from the first half [and you might surprise yourself that you are, in fact, full from the first half!]
3. You’re not “wasting” food. The habit of finishing everything on your plate is a bad one—it forces you to override the ‘full’ signals your brain is giving you and stuff yourself even though your body is telling you to stop. This will make it harder later to figure out if you actually are hungry or not. Just because you eat the food you’ve been served doesn’t mean you’re not wasting it—you’ll just be w-a-i-s-t-i-n-g it instead [Ohmygosh so clever.]
4. Act like a three year old. You don’t have to eat the parts of a meal or a snack that you don’t like. Having a piece of toast but don’t really care for the crusts? Cut them off and don’t worry about it. Why put something unhealthy in your mouth if you’re not enjoying it? Think that whoever invented pop tarts could definitely have left off those filling-less, cardboard-y edges? Me too. You don’t have to eat them. Only like the peanut butter cups out of your ice cream? Feel free to dig them out and throw the rest away. Make sure you’re enjoying your indulgences 100%.
5. When you go out, split a meal with a friend instead of getting your own. Eating out is one of the biggest triggers for stuffing myself, personally, because if I paid for it, I’m going to eat it. But splitting huge restaurant portions with a pal ends up with both of us feeling satisfied, but not so stuffed we want to stay in bed and die.
6. Another eating-out trick to try is skipping dinner altogether—just get an appetizer and a dessert. The appetizers are always yummy, perfect for two to share, and thenyou get to have dessert, which is really all you want anyway.
7. Make “small” the standard. When you order a cheeseburger at a fast food restaurant, make it a small. Same with getting a sugary coffee drink, or some fries, or an ice cream cone. You really aren’t sacrificing much, you still get to enjoy a treat, you just don’t start out with so incredibly much to finish. Plus small is cheaper, so you can buy one of these.
8. Get a bowl of chips [or some other delicious snack] rather than bringing the whole bag with you when you have a snack. You can always have more, but you’ll know how much you’re actually eating, instead of “somewhere between most and all of the bag.”