Portion Distortion, A Leading Culprit in Weight Gain

Many people struggle with maintaining a healthy weight, and often resort to radical fad diets, cleanses, or extreme forms of exercise that often have words like crazy or insane in their title. Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is done through energy balance. You must balance your energy intake so that it matches your energy output, while providing sufficient nutrients to keep your body in proper working order. This is not accomplished by eliminating macro nutrients from your diet or drinking a wild berry extract after performing 90 minutes of exercise that leaves you so sore you never do it again. It is accomplished by eating a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes, lean sources of protein and low fat dairy products, while eliminating or severely reducing processed foods and empty calorie foods such as soda and alcohol. This clean eating, done in adequate quantities to fuel your daily needs, accompanied with regularly performed physical activity, is what gets you to, and keeps you at a healthy weight.

One big stumbling block in all of this, is that what most people think of as a proper portion today, is much bigger than the same food portion  was 30 or 50 years ago. Considering that the average adult today is 26 lbs. heavier than the average adult was 60 years ago, and that the average dinner plate 30 to 50 years ago was 9" and the average dinner plate size since the 1990's is 12", you can see there is a smoking gun. Add to this that the average restaurant servings have grown fourfold in the same time period, and that 96 percent of chain restaurant meals exceed the dietary guidelines for sodium, fat, and saturated fat.

Some examples of this portion distortion can be seen on the videos, Portion Distortion, produced for the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. These video quizzes can be found on the myplate website of the USDA. A 3" bagel at 140 cal. 30 years ago, is dwarfed by todays 6" bagels weighing in at 350 calories. This is but one example of how our food has become super sized for us.

In order to get to and maintain a healthy weight, you need to scale back your portion sizes to a reasonable size. There are many tools and tricks to do this, many of which can be found at the myplate website of the USDA.

Stephen Stern, BS, CPT

Common Sense Fitness Personal Training

605 Washington Avenue

North Haven, Ct. 06473

203-530-1811

www.comsenfit.com

stepstern@comcast.net