Chrissie Webber works as a writer, business coach and motivation/ leadership trainer and is Managing Director of Life-Shapers Ltd, an online weight-loss motivation company. With over 20 years experience in the field of business and people development she has an expertise in the area of motivation for permanent weight loss.
Following a lifetime of weight issues - at her heaviest, over 21 stone and a massive size 30 – she has personal experience of diets and their devastating effect on size and psyche. With a background in nursing, psychology and business coaching, coupled with a lifetime of dieting, she developed and successfully used a series of models and tools that enhance weight loss motivation. Now over 5 dress sizes smaller and having sustained her weight loss for several years, Chrissie continues her passionate drive to change the mindsets of people away from a ‘Scarcity’ dieting mindset – where food is demonised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to an ‘Abundance’ mindset where mind, body and spirit work hand in hand with food and nature.
A few weekends ago I had a wake-up call regarding portion control. I was away for a short break, staying in a hotel, where at breakfast I had cereal from one of those individual packets. As I poured them into my dish I was amazed at the size of the portion. It was so much less than I would have served for myself at home.
This made me think about all the other portions of food I serve myself and just how easy it is to be eating far more than you realise is really needed by your body. So as an experiment I bought myself some of the healthy option ready meals for one. That was also an eye opener. I had not realised how much my self-served portions had crept up in volume!
It has to be said that I had also been an advocate of fresh food over ready meals. So it was quite a surprise to me when I found such a variety of healthy options without the additives that I had expected.
My initial reaction to my first ready meal was “That’s not going to be enough to keep me satisfied.” How wrong was I! The saying of ‘eyes being bigger than stomach’ sprang to mind and with such a truthful ring to it. The portions were just right and the different varieties kept me eagerly looking forward to my next meal instead of wondering what I wanted to eat or cook.
This got me thinking about how much is ‘full enough’. Eating these ready sized meals made me realise that I was experiencing a completely different feeling of satiety than I had been previously working on. The great thing was I did not get hungry any sooner with these smaller portions. And another advantage I found was the reduction in me food bills!
By taking note of how the portion size fitted my plate and by down sizing my plate – something I used to do – it is so much easier to serve up more appropriate portions of my good old home made cooking. It has also been a lot easier and more enjoyable than the old dieting method of weighing all my food portions. I don’t know about you but that always heightened my feeling of being different and somehow not good enough to eat like other people.
Training our eyes to be the scales for our stomachs is far easier and more motivating. Don’t forget though to watch for those portions creeping up in size again. It is all too easy to do.
