Portion Control Tricks

Watching your weight and what you eat is a good start. Whenever we sit down to munch, the last thing we want to think about is portion control. But for someone who is on a fasting or just looking to sustain their recent figure, that’s exactly what they should be doing.

Gone are the days of eating a bagel or muffin and feeling safe about its calories. In fact, researchers measured typical servings from takeout restaurants, fast food chains, and family-style eateries and found that bagels were 195 percent larger, muffins were 333 percent bigger and cooked pasta exceeded the standard by 480 percent.

Portion Control and Diet: How It Works

The first step in winning portion control is learning the correct serving size — the amount of food recommended based on Food Pyramid. The serving size can usually be found by reading nutritional labels. But the portion is the quantity of food or drink a person chooses to eat. In many cases, the portion eaten is larger than the serving size simply because we don’t know any better.

Portion control is limiting what you eat. We have to be aware of how much food you are actually eating and what calories are in that serving. The good news is with a little practice, portion control is easy to accomplish and can facilitate people be successful in reaching and then maintaining a suitable body mass.

Here are 10 simple ways to keep your portions a healthy size:

1. Measure accurately. For foods and beverages, use gadgets like a measuring cup, tablespoon, teaspoon, or food scale. According to studies, having a food scale at home will help you in achieving your desired weight in no time.

2. Learn how to estimate serving sizes. Ballpark’ food portion sizes by estimating serving sizes in comparison to known objects.

For example, three ounces of cooked meat, fish, or poultry is about the size of a deck of cards. Other easy measurements to eyeball include:
½ cup is the size of an ice cream scoop
1 cup is the size of a tennis ball
1 ounce of cheese is the size of a domino

3. Use portion control dishware. Pick out smaller plates, bowls, cups, and glassware in your kitchen and calculate what they hold. You might find that a bowl you thought held 8 ounces of soup actually holds 16, meaning you’ve been eating twice what you planned.

4. Dish out your servings separately. Serve food from the stove onto plates rather than family-style at the table, which encourages seconds.

5. Make your own single-serving packs. It is important to re-portion bulk quantities of favorite foods such as pasta, rice, and cereal into individual portions in zipper bags so that when you’re in the mood for some food munching, you’ll right away see the number of portions you’re preparing.

6. Add the milk before the coffee. When possible, put your (fat-free) milk into the cup before adding the hot beverage to better gauge the amount used.
7. Measure oil carefully. This is especially important because oil (even the healthful kinds like olive and safflower) have so many calories; Do not dispense it directly into your cooking pan or over food unless you are very sure how much you need to put.

8. Control portions when eating out. Eat half or share the meal with a friend. If eating a salad, ask for dressing on the side. Dip your fork into the dressing and then into the salad. If you are ordering for a dessert, you can split it with someone so at least you won’t feel guilty afterwards. Less the guilt, the better.

9. Add vegetables. Eat a cup of low-calorie vegetable soup prior to eating a meal, or add vegetables to casseroles and sandwiches to add volume without a lot of calories. It is important to include vegetables (raw or cooked) in your meal to balance everything.

10. Listen to your hunger cues. Eat when hungry and stop when satisfied or comfortably full. Try to gauge when you are 80 percent full and stop there. There will be more food at the next meal or snack!


They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but eating just apples for an entire month is a different matter. Not only is it unhealthy, it’s painfully dull too. Your body needs a smorgasbord of nutrients that are gained from various sources, so try looking for a diet that will provide you just that. You can change things up once you do a little research to find out which foods cooked which ways can give you the same benefits as other foods that are less exciting or interesting. You should also experiment in the kitchen—this will also help you become a better cook while you’re at it.

Food is one of our basic necessities, and a good diet regimen doesn’t erase that from your daily activities. Going on a diet should never be equated to starving yourself. A healthy diet should always be coupled with regular exercise. True, exercise can do you good, but it will never compensate for bad eating habits.