Tiny pots and pans

Which things do contribute to overeating? It´s a question I have been asking myself quite often during the last couple of months.
I have, by now, lost more weight than I would have believed to be able to, and I have decluttered  the clothes I wore at the higher weight. So, I must not go back to where I am coming from.

When I gained that weight, I felt as if something uncontrollable had taken possession of my body, making it go out of control and pile on pounds without my active participation.
That was wrong, of course.

What had happened was that the amounts I had been eating had, over time, become a lot bigger without my noticing it. Much bigger  than what I needed to eat.

And the plates weren´t the only culprits.
There was also the pot collection. When my husband and I moved in together, the single-serving-size cookware I had was relegated to the back shelves and replaced by bigger pots.

The problem with pots is the same as with plates: every increase in diameter of the pot makes for square times the increase in bottom surface, and consequently, for that much more volume in the pot.
Same thing with pans.
I was using cookware to cook for the two of us that held, not twice, but three to four times as much food as my old pots.

Of course, who sits down and calculates the contents of a pot or pan before buying it?
Nobody does.
And then there´s the pot on the stove, and you put food in it, say, vegetables. If you are like me, you´re mostly too lazy to get out the kitchen scales and weigh it, so you use the good ol´ Mark one eyeball to gauge how much you need to put in.
And boom, you´ve cooked three portions, while still believing you are cooking for two people.
So, you just divide  the contents of the pot by two and believe that to be one portion each, not the one-and-a-half  portion it objectively amounts to.

Those of you, gentle readers, with Weight Watchers experience will perhaps say, what´s wrong with one-and-a-half portion of zero points veggies?
Well, they are not zero calories veggies, and outside of a diet do, of course, get a generous slathering on of sauce, or butter, or olive oil, too.
Besides, what applies to vegetables will apply to every food that is cooked in these pots, portion-wise.
And what happens then is  your weight seemingly  getting out of control.

I´ve had enough of this scenario.
As long as I have only the two of us to cook for, there are not many occasions I would need to use the big pots and pans for. Cooking a whole chicken for soup, maybe, or frying two of those delicious big schnitzels that are flattened out to the point of barely fitting on a plate.
So, I have been drawing the consequences and banished the oversized cookware to the most inaccessible part of my kitchen cabinets.
What I have up front now and use daily are several of the smallest-size (16 cm diameter) pots and pans, plus some medium (20 cm or 24 cm diameter) ones. 
The scary part of using them is that I still feel as if I should cook more than would fit in there, only to see, after ladling the food on our new smaller dishes, that the portions are completely sufficient.
I think that is scary because in spite of having cut down on portions for almost nine months now, there still is that feeling of "not enough" even though it has been amply proven by now that what fits into these pots is enough.
What that means for me is clear. I must keep using the smaller cookware and the smaller plates, to avoid slipping back to unhealthy portion sizes.
And it´s for life.
 Because the Mark one eyeball simply doesn´t work for this.



Julia