Portion control

Aside from drinking LOTS of water (I drink 3 liters a day), the most important thing to pay attention to during weight loss is portion size. Understanding the normal portion size for different foods will help you to better control the number of calories you eat.

The best investment I ever made for my weight: a digital kitchen scale. My husband and I still have to stick to a tight food budget ($75-90 per week), so we are not able to eliminate all processed food from our diets. We still buy chips, crackers, pretzels, etc. When you have a large bag of chips in the house, it is very easy to sit down with the whole bag and say you are just going to eat one serving. But you get distracted by other things going on and eventually you have eaten much more than a single serving without even realizing what you have done. To "fix" this problem, my husband and I make baggies of snacks. Every other weekend, when I get home from the grocery store, we sit on the couch with plastic bags, a digital scale, and two big bowls. We weigh (or count) out a given serving size and make small snack bags for all snacks brought into the house. Then, when it is time to have a snack, you know that you are only eating a single serving without having to think about it while you eat.

Meat is another type of food that it is easy to overindulge on. Unless you are trying to put on large amounts of muscle, most people only need to eat 4 ounces of meat with a meal. This means that a single chicken breast will feed two people. Monitoring the amount of meat you eat will help you lose weight and trim down the food budget. Again, it is important to start by weighing your meat. Eventually, you will start to know what a serving looks like, but it is important to start by monitoring the actual weight.

Finally, find short cuts that help with portion control. Most mornings I have cereal with 1% milk for breakfast. I don't want to pull out my measuring cup every morning so I tried to find something that would hold my cereal and not give me more than a serving. I discovered that a coffee mug is the perfect size for my morning cereal. Now I no longer have to think about my breakfast, which is nice since it is so early in the morning.