Portion Sizes

I learned something very important about my eating habits/food thinking habits on Monday. I took a recipe that sounded wonderful and altered the ingredients to make it lower calorie, lower fat and overall, healthier. Now, you are probably thinking to yourself that this was a step in the right direction and it was and is, BUT, I keep finding my mind trying to figure out how to get the most food for the least calories. This is not healthy thinking and shows that I still have a lot of work to do on my healthy thinking habits.

I really need to stop thinking about the volume and quantity of food and start thinking about the quality. If, when eating, I slow down and really focus on the flavors, ingredients, and textures of the food I find that I am satisfied quicker. If, when eating, I focus on the volume and eating quickly, I find that I am not satisfied and when I am not satisfied is when I tend to eat more, get hungry quicker, and tend to want a snack/dessert afterwards. This volume fixation is more prevalent when we go to a restaurant. I find myself looking at portion sizes and thinking to myself, "this cost X dollars and it is this small". Sometimes I even judge a restaurant based on cost to volume ratios. When making recipes at home, I will take the recipe and use low-fat versions (I tend not to use fat-free versions because most of them taste horrible and I cannot use sugar-free versions due to some migraine trigger) of ingredients to ensure a greater volume of food. See, I do need to work on this. I guess writing about it is the first step.

Okay, here is my next mini-challenge (in the overall big challenge of losing 100 pounds).
-Within 1 week - research and start using proper portion sizes
-Choose recipes that are naturally healthy rather than substituting items with "light", "fat-free" or "sugar-free" versions.*
-When eating, focus on the flavors, textures and quality of the ingredients.
-Start choosing restaurants based on quality, not quantity.

I am going to Las Vegas in a few months. My first mini-challenge was to lose 30 pounds by the time I went. This new challenge is going to be extremely important for the Vegas trip, given the buffet situation there (I know we will be doing some buffets, but more on that later).

* There are some items that I prefer lighter - I like skim or 1% milk, I like 1% cottage cheese, I am not a big red meat lover so if recipes call for ground beef, I tend to use ground turkey or chicken.

That's all for today from The Tortoise's Weigh.