Recently, my old friends and neighbors, Marc & Suzanne, sent me this note about the blog:  “We love it!  Thank you for sending it.  We are not doing so well, weight wise.  We cook the healthy food, eat it, eat it again, eat it all, and then have dessert.”  This week’s post is about portion control.

     Yesterday I sat on a cozy couch with a group of friends, and we worked on a few recommendations to help people with portion control.  The first recommendation was to divide food into single-size portions right when you bring it home from the store.  In my house, I empty 2 large bags of peanuts into a bowl, then measure 1/4 cup of peanuts into each of about 18 baggies, knot each one, and then toss them all into a tin can for retrieval later, one at a time.  I am not a big fan of pre-portioned foods like granola bars and cereal bars, because they contain way too much refined carbohydrate and way too little nutrition.  If the ingredient list contains items not normally found in my kitchen, it’s not really food.  If it’s something my great-grandparents would not have recognized as food, it’s not.  But slicing up an apple or a grapefruit in advance, or grabbing a bag of nuts, ready to eat, is a great idea.

     Recommendation #2 was to serve meals on smaller plates.  Dinner plates, like our expectations about the size of a normal portion, have gotten larger over the past few decades.  You can fix that simply by using plates that are called “salad size.”  Or you can cover that large dinner plate (formerly the size of a typical serving plate) with a large amount of greens or salad, and place your other delights on top.  Of all the commercial diet programs, Weight Watchers does the best job helping adherents to learn to eat appropriate amounts of food.  In part, this is because they teach people to eat real food, and not prepackaged foods and supplements.  Teaching portion control is Weight Watchers’ greatest strength.

     Recommendation #3 was to serve food plated instead of family-style, and even to place the leftovers in the refrigerator before the meal begins.  A related recommendation, one that I’ve seen in action especially in my skinny friends’ homes, is to serve buffet style in the kitchen while guests eat in the dining room, necessitating that the diner rise and leave the table to get a second or third helping.  One variation on this theme would be to bring items like salad, pickles, and olives and so forth to the table, but to keep the other foods on the buffet. 

     Recommendation #4 was to savor the flavor, let chocolate melt on our tongues, eat at the table instead of in front of the television set, and be “in the moment.”  My friend Joe calls this “food consciousness.”  This morning for breakfast, I cracked a golden-orange yolked egg into hot butter, cooked it “sunny-side-upside-down,” slid it onto a small plate, and carried it to the kitchen table to be eaten in the light of the early morning sun.  I made sure to appreciate and enjoy the flavor of each bite.  I allowed nothing to disturb my concentration.  The egg was delicious.  How do I know?  I tasted every bit.   

     Recommendation #5 was to serve soup first.  It’s satisfying and flavorful, fills the belly with a volume of liquid, and gives the brain time to receive the message of satisfaction.  That way, hopefully, you will be less likely to overeat the next course.

    There are any number of reasons why people overeat.  The first and most obvious reason is hunger.  After we eat, it takes about 20 minutes for the signal to reach our brains.  So that’s how much time you need to wait to know if you are satisfied.  Before 20 minutes goes by, you can’t tell if you have had enough to eat.  So if you keep eating during those 20 minutes, you will end up feeling uncomfortably full.  Assuming your insulin levels are normal, that is.  Remember that high insulin levels coat the satiety centers in your brain and make it very difficult to tell whether or not you are full. 

     All kinds of cultural rules have evolved to help individuals regulate their appetites.  The French generally do not take seconds, nor do they snack between meals.  That’s much easier when you’ve eaten a tasty, satisfying, and enjoyable meal.  Parents in a community in the southeast Pacific teach their children to stop eating when they are 80% full.  That gives their brains time to catch up with their stomachs. 
 
     My friend asked me to talk about emotional eating, especially after dinner.  Oprah says that stopping eating at 7 p.m. each night was the single most constructive improvement she made to her eating patterns.  The importance of eating breakfast in this situation cannot be overemphasized.  If you have not eaten the amount of fuel (i.e., food) you need by the time you get up from the dinner table, you will eat the rest after dinner.  And then you won’t be hungry when you wake up in the morning.  To help you out of this vicious cycle, eat some protein for breakfast.  Cereal does not count.  This may not solve the problem entirely, but it will help.  For more help with emotional eating, read Dr. Sara Stein’s very special new book, Obese From The Heart.

     We are programmed to eat when there is food.  Only recently, evolutionarily speaking, have we become absolutely sure when we will be eating our next meal.  Only recently have large numbers of people found themselves in the midst of endless plenty.  So only recently have we needed to learn how to stop eating.  It goes against our natures, and this is why it is so challenging.  Nevertheless, I strongly believe that if we work WITH our metabolism, instead of AGAINST it, we will find it much easier to defer that second helping until it’s time for our next meal.  Then it won’t be a second helping.  It will be dinner.
 
     At the end of the meal comes dessert.  Dessert in our home consists of fruit.  Not fruit cups, or fruit roll-ups, or Fig Newtons.  Fruit.  A bowl of blueberries or strawberries.  Sliced kiwi or oranges.  Sometimes with a few squares of dark chocolate.  When company comes, we may go all out and serve ice cream, or my husband’s delicious banana-chocolate-chip cake.  Or both.  One serving, for special occasions.  Eaten slowly and savored for its unbelievably satisfying flavor.  Then I carefully wrap and freeze the remainder for another special day.  There will always be another special day, and another opportunity to enjoy a treat.  I promise.