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Shrink Your Plate to Shrink Your Stomach

rizzle | Oct 14, 2008 | Views: 1,637 |

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Using a Smaller Plate to Lose Weight.

If you were to look at the majority of people who have troubles losing weight, you would see many people who have problems controlling their portion sizes. For a lot of people, they manage to squeeze in three oversized meals per day which results in excessive calories being stored as well as a major slow down in your metabolic rate.

While eating 5-6 daily meals is ideal for losing weight, you can still make solid progress if you simply reduce the size of your three major meals per day.

Believe it or not the most difficult thing for people is putting food on a plate and seeing a bunch of empty space. It gives them the feeling that they are starving themselves and aren’t actually eating the amount of food their body desires.

If you were to give the same person two plates, one smaller than the other, without consciously thinking about it, they will naturally take a larger portion with the larger plate. What does this mean? That simply by switching to a smaller plate you will be less likely to eat an oversized portion as proven in the study "Ice cream illusions bowls, spoons, and self-served portion sizes.”

So what’s next? If you eat with a 12” in diameter plate, try reducing your daily plate size to 9”. Even if you cover the entire surface, you will be consuming 25% less food. Apply this to all of your meals and you’ve drastically reduced your daily caloric intake.

Changing Your Diet

Once you’ve reduced your plate size and you’ve noticed that you have either stopped gaining weight, or started losing weight, we can take this one step further; Controlling the food group portions on the plate.

This is the step that is really going to help melt off the pounds.

Step 1: Divide your plate in half; on one half of the plate, you will cover your plate with fibrous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, celery, peppers, cabbage or salad. (There are tons of other great vegetables too!)

Step 2: Take the remaining half of your plate and divide it into two. In one quarter you will cover with a lean protein source such as chicken, fish, eggs, lean beef or another protein source.

Step 3: In the remaining quarter of your plate you will place your starchy carbohydrate such as a potatoes, rice, pasta or bread. You must make sure to not overfill the starchy portion as it is the most vital to losing weight.

Voila, you now have a very well balanced meal.

Combine the smaller plate sizes, with your new way to divide your food groups and you are now armed with a great technique to melt off some of that unwanted weight.

Tags: Weight Loss; Plate Size; Diet; Nutrition; Health;