FOR SOME OF US
Portion control works to help people lose weight generally in only one instance; if they don’t care much about food and just eat on autopilot.
This happens when you grew up eating a certain way and so as an adult you just carry on the habit of eating whatever is put in front of you, or whatever portions your parents served you when you were a teenager let’s say.
These people don’t care all that much about their food, not the way we do anyway, and are likely emotionally invested somewhere else. Maybe for them it’s watching YouTube, sports or vaping, gossip etc.
They are more likely to accept a change as easily as guys except decor recommendations from women. “You think I should paint the walls pistachio green? Okay sounds good, I’ll go by the paint.” and it’s done.
Painful for the rest of Us
If you can get away with reducing your portion sizes and it all works well for you, then good on you, you don’t really need much in terms of diet advice or information on weight loss. You can likely go directly to emotional work and focus there.
But to most of us, reducing portion sizes is stressful, painful and adopts the concept of deprivation in order to lose weight, which has been shown billions of times over not to work at all. In fact it usually makes things worse as people feel shame about failing, shame about not having the strength to persevere, and shame about the overeating that happens in a binge-like fashion when they can’t take the pain anymore.
Don’t Waste your Time
That cycle that I explained above repeats itself in many different ways over the years, and the result is just wasted time, energy, and wasted potential change.
To not waste any more time, I’d recommend that in the suture you discard any notion or advice that tells you to go through some kind of pain or discomfort when you’re trying to get your eating under control, at least in the beginning stages. When you’re at a more advanced stage then you can start to play with discomfort as a tool to obtain further losses, but at least initially, the withdrawal effect is very strong when we deprive ourselves and usually wins out 99.99% of the time.
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JOY
Just like with exercise, people will tell you to choose something that you enjoy because you’re more likely to stick with it. I think the exact quote is, “The best exercise is the one you’ll stick with.”
It’s the exact same thing with dieting. If you’re not enjoying your food, or if you’re eating in a way that makes you feel deprived then it will ultimately fail.
What you need to do is find a way to change something in your diet that will allow you to lose weight, but at the same time keep some aspect of your diet that will allow you to feel satisfied or satiated.
A lot of the “how to” or mechanics of that concept above can be found on the GUIDE PAGE.
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Instead of Portion Control …
You want to keep eating about the same amount of food that you always have. At the end of the day you want to be able to say to yourself, “Hey, this is something I can do.”
So if you eat three meals a day plus dessert and you are an emotional eater, then I recommend you keep eating three meals a day plus dessert, but make slight changes to those meals, very slowly.
For example, if you love eating bagels and cream cheese every morning then keep doing so. The change you would implement would be to find some keto, or low carbohydrate bagels that you really like, that taste good, and use those instead of regular bagels. Many of those keto bagel recipes really suck, but I have tried a few that are pretty good and so I’d suggest you keep looking until you find one. That little bit of effort it takes to find a good keto bagel (or whatever you are looking to replace) is worth the effort a thousandfold in terms of giving back to you in long-term health benefits, and of course in how you look 🙂
Here’s a recipe that I use often. It’s delicious and really filling too:
Excellent Cheese Keto Bagels
Servings
4-6
Bagels
Prep time
5
minutes
Cooking time
12
minutes
Type
Pure
Keto
Ingredients
-
1 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella (about 6 ounces)
-
2 ounces full-fat cream cheese, cut into pieces
-
1 large egg
-
1 1/4 cup almond flour
-
1 tbsp baking powder
Directions
- Preheat oven to 400 F and line a baking sheet with parchment.
- Place the mozzarella cheese and cream cheese in a microwave safe bowl and microwave for 1 minute. Stir and microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute more. Add egg and dry ingredients until a dough forms. It is very sticky! Scrape onto a piece of cling film and place into the freezer.
- When oven is ready, remove the bagel dough from the freezer and divide into 6 equal pieces. Lightly oil hands and roll each portion into a snake and seal the ends together forming a ring. Place on the parchment paper and top with your favorite topping, pressing gently to adhere.
- Bake for 12 minutes or until the outside has browned. They will still be soft, so let them cool before removing from the baking sheet. Once cool, store in a bag in the refrigerator. Warm slightly to enjoy or toast.
- Makes 6 average sized bagels. Dividing the dough into 8 portions results in mini bagels and dividing into 4 results in gourmet sized bagels. (Don’t have a food processor? Read the post for other methods.)
- Keep bagels in the refrigerator in an airtight container. They keep for 7-10 days and also freeze well.
Notes
- Some people add a TBSP of protein powder to give it a protein boost. This bagel/bread is filling and delicious and sure to satisfy any emotional eater.
CONCLUSION
Portion control can be useful to certain people but for the vast majority of us, it aggravates the situation and just gives us more headache and stress. Nobody needs that.
Take on the issue of emotional eating like a small project, put it on autopilot and over time the results are there. See THE GUIDE for information on how to do that.
Remember, all overeating is emotional eating, so keep reading this blog and other resources to get a handle on this pesky issue.
- EatingComfort
