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Portion Control

Dear Tricia:

What is best for portion control, weighing food or using the the typical, size of my fist measuring?

~Personally, I find actually weighing my foods to be easiest in the beginning.  From there I can generally get a good idea of a serving based on sight.  I also use a lot of smaller plastic containers that I can put my preweighted foods into.  That helps in the future so that I eventually I'm not weighing every single thing.

I need to be more disciplined in how much I put on my plate. Do you have any advice or thoughts about How i can manage portions?

~weighing the portions is always helpful.  There are also some great apps available which you can actually use to put your own recipes in, to then determine what the portions should be.  One of my favorite apps is My Fitness pal which allows me to scan bar codes of items I put into recipes then once the entire recipe is inputed, I can determine how many calories I want to eat that night and from there determine how many portions are in the entire recipe to get to where I need to be calorie wise.  It's not an exacty science but really helps to keep me on track on a daily basis.

How do I begin?

Dear Tricia:

I know I need to start making changes to my diet and level of exercise but I am not sure how to start. Do you have any guidance as to how to Begin?

~ B

Dear B,
My advice is to start small.  If you start with an hour of cardio when you don't normally do cardio you are not going to want to go back and do it again!  So my advice is to make changes you can stick to and build upon.  Whenever I start a new exercise routine or try a new machine out at the gym I always start with just 10 minutes.  From there I can go back the next day and the next and keep building up those muscles slowly.  Same holds true to your diet, start really looking at what you are eating.  I always recommend a food journal to begin with.   There are many apps you can use, or a good old fashioned notebook.  Keep track of every morsel, every calorie and even the carbohydrates if you can.  It really is eye opening when you start looking at what you do daily and it usually becomes very obvious what you can easily cut out and where your bad habits are.

~Tricia