Losing weight is easy, right? Eat less, move more, and you’ll lose weight. But most of us have absolutely no idea what a portion size is. I know I didn’t. My husband and I had to reeducate our selves what a real portion looked like. To do that, we used a few tools:
- Pictures of portion sizes. In the first Weight Watchers book, they show graphically what different portion sizes are. For example, a tennis ball is about half a cup. A deck of cards is four ounces. I ripped those pictures out of the book and taped them to the refrigerator as a constant reminder of what different sizes are, right where I was preparing food.
- Measuring cups. You can’t just eyeball food amounts; the best way to know until you get used to it is to use a measuring cup. We would measure the food and then see what it looked like in the bowl or plate.
- Smaller plates and bowls. Reasonable servings looked rather lost on our plates, which we had bought with our penchant for large servings in mind. We put away our larger dinner plates and started eating meals on the smaller salad plates. Our cereal bowls easily held 4 or more cups, so we bought and used smaller bowls.
- A scale. It’s hard to measure some foods, like chips. A scale takes the guesswork out of it, and the temptation to round out the cup a bit… or add a little more after measuring out a cup.
Yes, this all sounds hard. It WAS hard. But it’s a lot easier now that I’ve done that work. And it worked! The first week, I lost over 6 lbs.
