Portion Control Diet - Why it is Still the Most Affective

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If you follow the actual USDA recommended portion sizes for meats, vegetables and carbohydrates you will be severely shocked to find that the daily or meal sizes and weight recommendations are far less than what we actually eat on a daily basis. A good example will be what they recommend for a serving of meat which amounts to 3 oz. which is basically a steak the size of your palm and about ½ inch thick. For a proper frame of reference our normal meat serving can go all the way up to 16 oz. This problem with mismatched sizes also extends to pastas and carbohydrates. The USDA recommendation for a serve is half a cup which can equate to about 4 twirls of the fork. Some single serves of pasta in fast food restaurants can be as much as 12 to 16 times more than the recommended USDA amount.

As you can imagine with portion sizes so out of control in the food industry it is only normal that most people will tend to overeat and get fat over time. One of the best thing that you can do when ordering food is to request a half order of everything that you are going to have. Most restaurants will be able to cater for this quite easily. If you don’t feel like cutting everything in half, studies have also shown that eating a large salad with vinaigrette dressing will full you stomach up so you will find it hard to finish your main and will most probably forego the desert at the end.

Fast Food Restaurants

Needless to say, if you are thinking of slimming, fast food restaurants should be avoided. The food outlets that are by-far the worst in giving oversized portion and even recommending people to upsize further are fast food restaurants. I would be safe to say that there are currently no fast food restaurants that offer serving size that are the same or smaller than the USDA recommended portion size.

One of the worst things that people do is to order take-away or food on the run because they are busy. What this does is that you don’t think of the portion recommended and end up consuming far too much calories for the serving. A perfect example of a common take-away serving size problem is muffins. The USDA recommendation for a muffin is 1 oz. packing about 120 calories per serve. Fast food chain Au Bon’s have muffins that are averagely 4.5 oz and packed with no less than 600 calories per muffin. They also pack a total of 6 teaspoons of fat to boot.

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