In my early 20's, I remember walking the freezer section of the supermarket to find the best tasting microwave meals with the lowest calorie and fat gram content. I stocked up on canned soups based on the same thing. Diet soda? Yes please. Four liters a day, in fact, 'cause why not? Zero calories.
Even though I grew up with ample freedom to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, something shifted in my late teens that prompted me to believe that I needed to restrict my portion sizes and reduce my calorie intake in order to be healthy and stay thin.
The result culminated into a compulsive, restrictive dieting mindset that eventually led me down the road to an eating disorder. While I didn't weigh my food, I certainly measured it, whether looking at the 'serving size" or estimating portion size with my fist, or buying a package that took out all the guesswork for me.
For 13 years, women have walked into my private practice with their own version of 'portion control'; chronic dieting, counting calories, points and fat grams and restricting portion sizes all with the well-intended hope of losing weight and getting healthy. The problem is that it wasn't working for them. It wasn't sustainable, enjoyable or aiding in long-lasting weight loss. It left them tired, frustrated and at the end of their rope and oftentimes, being at the end of their rope is what brought women into my office. They desired a new way that was lighter, more freeing and empowering.
What I've found is that all these women - counting calories and fat grams, following strict rules and portion sizes - would lose the weight, stop their "diet", gain the weight, then go on the same or another diet, follow strict rules and skip meals, lose the weight, then gain it back. The model is simply not sustainable AND it's not the way our bodies were designed to be nourished.
Also, the food they were eating and measuring wasn't real food. It was packaged, processed and loaded with chemicals. What your body is really after isn't a certain quantity of food as much as she's after the quality of food.
Yet, as a society, we keep doing the same thing over and over again. We go on and off diet after diet, year after year, using portion size as a measure of true success.
The thing is, if you approach food and eating as a list of rules, calories & fat grams, and portion sizes, you set yourself up for a lifetime of weight and food woes, shame & guilt, as well as hormonal imbalance, energy issues, and weight fluctuations. Plus you take the pure joy out of eating simply because you're focusing on an external number and someone else to determine how much food you need at each meal to truly nourish your body or help you be at your healthiest weight.
Not all calories are created equally. At the cellular level, food is information. If you are eating a meal based on a portion size versus the quality of nutrients it gives you, your body still might be lacking the information it needs at the cellular level to know what to do with it.
If you are eating REAL food, food your body knows what to do with, your body gets more of what she needs. The information your body receives from nutrient-rich food is sufficient and at the cellular level, she will begin to communicate differently to you.
The deeper conversation we could be having about portion control is about a woman trusting herself, trusting her body. I meet a lot of women that use portion control because they fear being "out of control" around food. It gives them boundaries and parameters about how much is "okay" to eat. When a woman learns to trust her body and be connected and relaxed inside her body, she will hear her body communicate when enough is enough and it's not when the "fist-sized" portion of chicken has been eaten. It's from a much deeper place.
