Spring is here which means winter is over. As such, you may want to shed a few of those winter pounds. One of the easiest and best ways is to use portion control when dishing up your meals. The benefits of portion control are you don’t need to buy any overpriced specially-formulated meal packets from a weight loss center. You don’t need to count calories. You don’t necessarily change what you are eating. You simply change how much you eat and believe it or not Post-It notes can help you do it.
If you cut your meal servings by a simple 1/4 it’s not difficult to do. You’ll hardly notice the difference. In fact, you may find you are less hungry than if you ate the full portion. And ultimately, you’d be cutting your calorie intake by 25%. Stated a different way, if you are eating 2000 calories a day, cutting back on how much you put on your plate by a simple 1/4 could be cutting your calories by a whopping 500 per day! That is enough for 1 pound of weight loss each week.
The problem with this method is it can be easily and conveniently forgotten. We can be busy and stressed and when mealtime rolls around we can forget to look at how much we are putting on our plates. So that’s where this Post-It note tweak can help.
What you do is take a small stack of Post it notes. On each one use a Sharpie to write down "Only Small Portions on this Plate" on each Post-IT. Then, as you are unloading the dishwasher or putting your dishes away, stick one of the notes in the center of each plate and bowl. When you are done, you have a self-reminding system in place for when you grab a plate, you’ll have your reminder in place. It will be impossible to ignore because you’ll have to remove the note before you put food on your plate.
The good thing about this tip is you can reuse your post it notes. Simply stack them in the cupboard until you are putting dishes away the next time.
In a near-future post I’ll go over some of the portion cutting tricks I used to lose 50 pounds when I was overweight.
This tip comes from the Achieve-IT newsletter which is a free, no-spam, personal development newsletter for the computer generation. You can subscribe here.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmmm… I’ve been meaning to get my little brother to start brushing his teeth more than once a week. I guess I’ll put a stickie note on all his N64 cartridges: “Brush your goddamn teeth; your breath smells like a farm animal.”
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LOL…
how about taping tic tacs to the “input” end of the cartridge – that way he can’t pop in the cart without having to move the breath mints..while he’s at it he’ll probably eat one.
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I think weight loss is all about three things – attitude, diet and exercise. From my experience, reducing carb intake and doing aerobic exercises are keys to successful weight loss.
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