Portion creepy

Hello everyone,

The most important thing for me, when wanting to lose and maintain a loss, is to never stop being watchful.That means weighing myself daily,and watching what I eat, too. 

I know that a lot of people out there think that daily weighing yourself is too frustrating in the long run, but for me, it means that I can catch a changing trend in my weight early and then compensate for it before the weight has a chance to settle back on, possibly bringing a couple of friends for company.

Of course, I have to know the usual fluctuations of my body, so these don´t put me off too much (like those two pounds that seem to come out of nowhere and then leave again once a month). 

  As for watching what I eat, I know that I will never be able to rely on any natural regulatory mechanisms. I messed those up too badly over the course of a lifetime of battling my weight.

So, one thing I have done in preparation for this is measuring and weighing what I used to think were "normal" portions I was eating. 

This turned out to be a real waker-upper, especially after I compared them to the portion sizes that are used and recommended in restaurant handbooks (European ones, where supersizing everything hasn´t arrived yet).

So, how could that kind of portion inflation happen? 

The first thing to come to mind was too-big plates. 

I had, in imitation of what they use in expensive restaurants, bought us a set of plates that were originally intended to go under the real serving plates to protect the dishcloth!  They were roundabout twice the size of the old dinner plates I inherited from my Grandma. 

What I hadn´t counted on was that those bigger plates were an invitation to load them full to the same point of optical loadedness as I had used to load the smaller ones.
So, it was a simple matter of math- the surface size of a circular plate growing square times the increase in diameter.So, on a plate with twice the diameter, you can put four times as much food on them before they look as full as the smaller one.
The really insidious part of this is that you can, consequently, load on twice as much and still believe that plate to be less full than the other one.
As insidious is what I would call optical habituation. You have a certain picture in your head of what a full plate of food has to look like, and you do, automatically, continue to pile on food until the plate looks comfortably filled.
Doing that with those restaurant-sized plates means putting on a lot more than a "real" portion.
Ever wondered about the jokes they make about how eating in a gourmet restaurant in Europe means paying a lot of money for a diminutive portion of food? Turns out the portion isn´t too small after all, it just looks that way on the big plates they use.
I am, of course, not the first person to make that discovery. That honor goes to Brian Wansink whose website can be found at www.mindlesseating.org. He´s put it all a lot better than I could have done. (Btw I am not in any way affiliated to him or his company).

But for me, part of what started me on this weight loss journey was the realization that he was right, and that I, too, had fallen into the portion size trap.
I would have sworn I wasn´t eating too much at all, not refilling my plate, putting everything I wanted to eat on the plate and then leaving the kitchen, when in reality I was eating twice as much as I needed. I vehemently denied eating too much, to the point where I started a big quarrel with a family member who confronted me about my weight gain, putting the gain down to health issues.

The sad truth- sad for almost everyone who is overweight- is that in weight mangement, as everywhere else on this planet, nothing evolves out of nothing. For my body to store 3500 calories as one pound of fat, I have to put the said 3500 calories inside my body first. So, gaining a hundred pounds- which is what I have done- means putting 350 000 calories into your body above what your body uses up.
Again, if you go and divide that by the 365 days in a year, you´ll see that it computes to less than a thousand calories a day. Less than one of those infamous big burgers. Less than a standard-sized can of salted peanuts a day.

The math of it is inescapable.

And, as it takes a lot of exercise to burn off a thousand calories, the place where I have to adjust the balance is what I put into my body, not what goes out as calories burned. Sports can be good for you, but if you continue to overeat, you´ll never get rid of that weight.

Oops, I guess I just invited a flame war from everyone who still is operating under the assumption that fat can develop out of thin air. Rest assured, it doesn´t. Until I understood what had happened, I wasn´t able to get rid of any of the accumulated fat either. And I was as violent in refuting the very idea that my eating habits had anything to do with my weight.
Only when I pulled the brakes on portion sizes I managed to get rid of part of what my eating habits had cost me in terms of weight gain.

And the other part is what I´m working on.

Julia