Why smaller portions was the best weight loss program for me.
This might sound a little strange and go against the status quo, but I lost weight without doing any excessive exercise and I carried on eating exactly the same food I’ve always eaten.
No silly fad diets, no exhausting exercise, no sacrifices on what I ate – so how did I lose the weight?
Simple, I stopped being greedy and cut down on the amount of food I ate.
Best Weight Loss Program Smaller Portion Size
Smaller portions was the key to my weight loss or should I say ‘our’ since my hubby has also lost weight this way. No more hearty portion sizes just reasonable portions of food on our plates.
Losing Weight at Christmas – Say What?
Best weight loss diet ever – eating this way I even managed to loose weight at Christmas!
The strategy was to eat the exact same food we always ate, just smaller portions of that exact same food. That included everything we ate, so snacks were also reduced in size, then frequency. What was a daily junk food snack has become an occasional treat and is a very rare occurrence in our diet plan, but we still eat them when we fancy them nothing on the small portion diet is denied. A doughnut for example is shared between my hubby and I or I save the other half for another day rather than 1 or 2 doughnuts each like it used to be.
Easy diet plan to follow
Our first steps were to cut our portion sizes down to what we felt comfortable eating, when our bodies had adjusted we reduced our food down a little further until we were eating a more sensible amount of food on our plates, an amount that didn’t make us feel hungry and now keeps our weight stable.
Our success in weight loss happened over several months NOT overnight.
Best thing about this losing weight this way is you’re in total control of your actions, it is totally up to you how much you reduce your portion sizes down too and when. The key is to cut down on all portion sizes of everything on your plate not just one item of food, so that includes piles of mash potatoes, gravy, ketchup, snacks, puddings – everything.
Weight Loss Was Easy, didn’t feel like a diet
We found our weight loss plan easy because it was a slow and gradual change rather than an over night solution to being fat. It gave our bodies time to adjust and wasn’t a shock to the system since we were eating the same food, but in smaller portions over weeks and months.
We still ate all the food groups we normally ate, we didn’t follow a no carbs diet cut, we didn’t drink loads of water to fill our stomachs before eating food or wear a eye mask at the dinner table, We didn’t follow any silly celebrity diet plans like the lemon diet.
Gentle Weight Loss Program
No tricks or extreme diet routines. We ate what we wanted, when we wanted it, the only thing that changed was how much we ate.
That’s why I liked the way we lost weight it was a gentle transition. No more of a chore taking off the weight as it was putting it on.
Weight Loss Motivation
I know losing weight is supposed to be hard and requires motivation to continue slimming down long term, but we found it easy on this diet. We never felt hungry, tired, grumpy or depressed while we were on our diet program, the only motivation we needed to encourage us was seeing our slimmer frames in our baggy clothes. It was so simple, we took it slowly a day at a time, deciding if and when we where ready to cut our food down a little further.
Eating Healthier
During the process of reducing our portion sizes our attitude to food changed and we started to eat healthier over the course of our weight loss plan.
Eating healthier wasn’t a part of the plan originally we were aiming at losing a modest amount of weight – drop a couple of jeans sizes at best. We never thought we would be so successful, losing the weight encouraged us to eat better food, our diet evolved over the course of our weight loss program we now eat a more Mediterranean diet and our mindset is more of a French diets ethos.
My husband needed this time to change his attitude towards what he ate, before our diet he only liked 4 vegetables and the odd piece of fruit :) Now he even eats brussel sprouts and broccoli
Losing Weight This Way Sure Did Work For Us :)
I’m now the size I was as a teen and I’m almost 40. Our diet and out look to food and life evolved after seeing our results from our weight loss and we wanted more. Being slimmer encouraged us to be healthier and care about what we were putting into our bodies, we have greatly reduced sugar in our diet and fatty food.
Best thing of all our grocery bills have also lost weight, we spend a lot less on the weekly shop than we used to when we had a bad diet.
Tea Without Sugar – OH MY!
The most extreme thing I did during our diet was I stopped nibbling on food while I was cooking dinner and I went cold turkey on sugar in my tea and coffee…. I know what your thinking ‘I’m a rebel’ :)
They were little changes I felt I could do from day one.
My husband doesn’t have sugar in his tea any more, but it took him months to wean himself of the white stuff completely, a bit at a time.
Weight Loss Advice
I’m not telling anyone that this diet is a miracle cure for losing weight. This is mine and my husbands personal experience of our weight loss journey, all I can say is it worked for us and hope it motivates you.
Best advice I can give anyone when they choose to slim down is always remember it took time to put the excess weight on so it’s going to take time to take it off, the good news is it doesn’t take as long as you might think to drop a jean size or two.
Within 12 months I had gone from a UK dress size 20 plus to 12, within 24 months I’m now a size 8 and stable and eating a healthier diet.
I wish everyone great success in their weight loss endeavor what ever it may be.
Marie xxx
The Not So Secret, Secrets to Weight Loss
I don’t understand the concept of Secrets to Weight Loss, suggests some sort of trick or magic pill to loose weight.
There are no secrets to weight loss, if you consume more energy than you use in a day AND that energy is converted to fat, you get fat.
Loosing weight isn’t rocket science.
The simple fact is to loose weight you have to consumes less energy than you use in a day so your body is forced to use it’s fat reserves.
It’s not a secret, it’s always worked this way and until a magic weight loss pill is developed it will always work this way.
There are basic physiological and psychological techniques to make reducing energy intake easier, for example;
We used smaller plates, since the plates are smaller when you add less food than you’d have on a normal size plate it looks like a lot of food: filling a small bowl to the top looks like you have a large meal. Could be half what you used to eat, but your brain sees a full plate/bowl (big meal).
We consumed a lot of full fat milk, we slowly (over months) watered the milk down. Started with about 10% of water and overtime increased to 50%: we now drink milk that’s 50% water and other than when drinking milk on it’s own we can’t tell the difference in cereals/tea/coffee.
We stopped buying treats we didn’t LOVE. Rather than buying different types of chocolate etc… that we’d eat, but aren’t our favorite we ONLY bought our favorite treats (chocolate with hazelnuts for us- that’s delicious). If it’s not your favorite treat, don’t eat it.
If you’ve put weight on with your current dietary habits that won’t reverse without changing those habits. Making large dramatic dietary changes is difficult: I used to eat snacks like doughnuts and used to dislike nuts and fish, now I love nuts and fish and not so keen on doughnuts (too much sugar). Over the course of about a year we slowly improved our diet: small changes so we barely noticed the difference, but over the course of months/years it makes a huge difference.
It took years to put the weight on, we were happy for it to take years to take it off.
We read the labels of processed foods, for example a ‘healthy’ high bran cereal with fruit I was buying had around 20% added sugar, that’s on top of the sugars from fruit etc…!!!! That’s not a healthy cereal!!! I slowly switched to a home made cereal mix. Started with an Alpen (Alpen is quite high sugar, but better than most cereals)/Wheatbix (low sugar) mix (which I liked a lot) and slowly added things like rolled oats (low sugar), shredded wheat (low sugar), sultanas (high natural sugar) and walnuts (protein and taste) and slowly reduced the higher sugar processed Alpen.
Marie used to eat processed cereals coated in chocolate etc… she’s now addicted to the above mix. It’s about small changes you barely notice, before you know it your diet has completely changed and you love it because it’s the new norm.
On exercise, exercise plays a minor roll in weight loss, if you can exercise like an Olympic athlete you’ll loose weight. I’m disabled and can’t exercise much (my only exercise is walking) yet lost several stone just making minor dietary changes overtime. If you are like most people the extra exercise you do to loose weight will be similar to eating one less slice of bread a day (if that). Easier to just eat one less slice of bread than kill yourself exercising. Then there’s the “I just did an hour Zumba, time for a treat” approach: that’s consuming more energy that will be converted to fat :-)
The funny thing is not one person reading this will make the sort of changes above, because the weight loss industry has convinced you there’s a secret to weight loss and you just have to follow the next celebrity endorsed diet or super food for a few weeks for instant results.
Good luck staying overweight because you are trapped in the mistaken belief there’s a secret to weight loss :-(
David Law
The Not So Secret, Secrets to Weight Loss