Sustainable Portion Control: How to Feel Satisfied With Less Food
One practice that both pro-diet and intuitive eating practitioners aim to eliminate is overeating.
If you’re following a diet, the reasoning behind smaller portions of food is to decrease your overall intake, thus leading to weight loss…
…whereas an intuitive eater will pay attention to their hunger signals to ensure they stop eating when they feel full.
The aim of my writing and coaching is not to help you change the size of your body but rather to help you enjoy a peaceful, balanced, healthy relationship with food. To do so, dieters and intuitive eaters alike will want to ensure that their portion sizes don’t exceed their bodies’ energy needs.
Furthermore, I teach my Food Body Self® students how to stop overeating not because there is anything inherently bad about the size of their bodies, but because there can be a lot of discomfort associated with overeating:
Physically, in the form of reflux, bloating, gas, constipation, and other digestive distress,
Cognitively, in the form of self-criticizing, self-blame, feeling out of control, etc., and
Emotionally, in the form of guilt, shame, and other negative emotions
So why isn’t discomfort enough to stop people from overeating?
Most individuals are able to decrease their intake temporarily. Problems arise once they begin to feel dissatisfied with what they’re eating, either because their appetite increases, or because they feel mentally restricted leading to increased cravings. This is a major reason why dieting can become a roller coaster of restriction and overeating.
(Note: Emotional eating, which is a common form of overeating, is a topic I’ve covered extensively in the past so I’m intentionally not including it here.)
The big question becomes:
How do you stop overeating while feeling satisfied with less food?
Satisfaction is central to the topic of portion control. I’ll refer to satisfaction using two terms: physical satiety, to indicate an absence of physical hunger, and mental satiety, to indicate an absence of non-hunger cravings to eat.
Physical Satiety: Satisfying Your Appetite
If you’re hungry, you’ll feel a desire to eat. But your food choices will influence how quickly you feel full and how long you feel satisfied for. If you want to decrease your odds of exceeding your body’s energy needs, you’ll want to achieve satiation and stay satiated for as long as possible with fewer calories.
Decreasing your overall intake doesn’t simply mean breaking your meals up so that you’re eating smaller meals more frequently throughout the day. Your total caloric intake matters more than how often you eat. I also like to focus on what we can add to your diet rather than what to take away.
Increasing the amount of lean protein you eat is a reliable way to achieve and maintain fullness. Examples of lean proteins include: non-fat Greek yogurt, egg whites, whey protein, chicken breast, lean ground beef, white fish, shrimp.
Swapping some of your starchy carbs for vegetables is another helpful place to start. For example, halving the amount of rice or pasta on your plate and doubling your veggies.
I could go on, but you probably already know what a healthy, filling plate looks like. What I’d rather focus on is this:
If you’ve already attempted to make changes such as these to your eating habits before and they didn’t stick, we need to examine why. That’s going to require us to talk about your mental satiety.
Mental Satiety: Satisfying Your Mind
Mental satiety is not just about building a lower-calorie plate but feeling satisfied with it. It means when you feel full, you’re not still thinking about what you want to eat next.
If you want to make lasting changes to your eating habits, we need to get you out of a scarcity mindset, where you’re focused on all the things you can’t have, what’s off-limits, and feeling limited in what/when/how much you can eat.
A food scarcity mindset is the term I use to describe the feeling that you don’t have enough, and it leads to feeling preoccupied with food while reducing your mental capacity, processing and decision-making, and self-control.
So let’s flip the script.
Rather than focusing on what you want to have less of, why do you want to eat more veggies, more whole foods, and so on?
Here’s one answer:
Because a diet consisting of mostly whole, minimally processed foods is rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), fiber, and water. It will provide you with lasting energy, improve your digestion, and promote a healthy body composition that helps you feel vibrant, alert, and strong.
Getting full on these foods helps me maintain a food abundance mindset. Abundance is the opposite of scarcity: feeling like you have enough, or more than enough.
And contrary to what you might be thinking, sweets, fast foods, takeout, processed foods and the like are NOT off-limits.
These foods do not negatively impact our health when eaten in moderation, and in fact, by including them in limited amounts without guilt, we can reduce instances of overeating which can negatively impact both our physical and mental health.
But let's go one step further:
If you’re like most people, you probably associate “healthy” foods as being bland or boring, and conversely associate “unhealthy” foods as being tasty and indulgent.
But this creates a problem: if you associate eating healthy foods with being boring or restrictive, you’re going to need to rely on your willpower each time you choose what to eat.
To make healthy foods more appealing such that you actually desire them more, begin by choosing foods you actually enjoy. I like to tell my Food Body Self® students that I only have one food rule: Don’t eat food you don’t like.
Furthermore, don’t boil some broccoli and call it a day. Make an effort to make your dishes taste good. Choose produce that’s in season. Prepare it in ways that you enjoy. And flavor your dishes with citrus, vinegars, or herbs and spices.
And finally, pay attention to how you describe your food in your mind. Eat the meals you prepare in a mindset of indulgence. Cultivate a feeling of nourishment and self-care with your meals. Allow food to be one of the many ways you care for yourself with love and compassion.
I want to reiterate that this article is not intended as weight loss advice. My priorities, first and foremost, are your relationships with food, your body, and yourself. My interest lies in your physical and mental health and well-being, not the size of your body.
Overeating, of course, does impact your weight, wherein continuing to do so can lead to weight gain and ending it can result in weight loss or maintenance. But I want to emphasize that I am not demonizing weight gain or larger bodies in discussing how to end this practice.
Additionally, I believe that by de-emphasizing weight loss and focusing on your relationship with food, you’ll increase the likelihood of success in changing your behavior around food, such as overeating.
I want you to feel satisfied with the food you eat, because I believe physical and mental satiety are key components to a peaceful, balanced, and joyful relationship with food.
And I can’t wait for you to achieve that.