Diets require portion control, which means lots of self control and a commitment to reading food labels and becoming familiar with the size of what foods belong on your plate. With a new year often comes an opportunity to change eating habits, so I am looking at the sizes of my food items. That’s how I hope to get to a slightly smaller size.
It’s tough already.
The first adventure with portion control I experienced involved peanut butter; it’s supposed to have some health benefits, but I found by reading the label that the serving size is about two tablespoons. One cannot make a decent peanut butter sandwich with two tablespoons of peanut butter. That’s more like a well-smeared cracker sized portion. Imagine how many tablespoons is needed to fill a regular sandwich, even without jelly, and spreading it thin to boot!
I’ve found that most food is sized for odd numbers of consumers: three servings to a bag of vegetables, or even decimals for partial portions. Who wants to be the one to receive the .5 serving? Portioning out vegetables which comes in, say, a microwave bag, means not only that you won’t get to use the bag for its intended purpose, but you must find multiple containers into which you dole out the servings if you’re not using them all. As a single person, this can make a messy fridge and freezer, stocked full of food portions.
Also, once the food leaves its original container, you have to find a way to date the new container, and you will want to use the things expiring the earliest first. This means a whole new world of glass vessels with lids that nest, various sizes of freezer bags, aluminum foil and shifting fridge shelves to accommodate it all.
I opened a package of chicken tenders and discovered that of the nine in the package, I was supposed to eat only two. This posed the problem of deciding whether to break my diet by having three in one sitting, just chopping the outlier up into a salad, dividing it into quarters to nibble on a nib with each serving or throwing it out for the feral cats to feast upon.
Dessert was even worse. My favorite brand of gelato comes in a nice little 16-ounce container, and it’s a joy for the palate: layers of cool lusciousness with chocolate bits and cherries and, I discovered, a dash of vermouth! Who can break a diet when something that good is calling from the freezer? Dutifully I checked out the portion size: one third of the container. Since it’s a layered dessert, I tried to work out the methodology to getting one third out of a cylindrical container. I tried to imagine the legendary peace symbol and work my spoon accordingly, but strangely I always ended up with something like forty percent. Since this product is produced in small batches, that probably means they won’t consider upping the amount for four people or going down to two, so if I want to continue enjoying dessert, I will have to start using a food scale.
Dieting will make me look somewhat like a scientist as I weigh my gelato.
Of course there are all the other opposing caveats when dieting, such as not using canned anything, watching the carbs and the fat and the sugar, and going natural. I gave up orange juice and eat a small mandarin or clementine instead, which supposedly cuts out a lot of excess sugar and adds fiber. However, I did that six months ago, and still gained five pounds. Milk has also been a sticking point. Two percent milk still has a lot of sugar per serving, but milk from grass-fed cows is supposed to be healthier for you. So here I am with my milk and one gram of sugar in my cereal and a small sliced up banana added to it for breakfast, hoping I’m doing something right.
At least I can see my feet when I stand up, but how much weight I may lose is still to be determined.
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