Simple Diet System

Here is my simple diet system to maintain my weight. I have included pictures and links to help to explain my system.

• Cook
• Portion Control (The key to the system)
• Freeze
• Meal Portion
• Weight Feedback

Cook

Now I cook on the weekends a couple of dishes and am done cooking for the week. Sometimes doubling the recipe.

This past weekend I cooked a Spinach Casserole and French Onion soup. After cooking I will refrigerate the food to make it easier to portion and freeze.

Whenever I eat what I just cooked I eat too much of it. I do not portion, I just keep spooning. Good hot food is sitting on the stove just waiting for me to eat seconds.

Portion Control (The key to the system)

For portions I do not pay attention to the recipes because a recent study of the "Joy of Cooking" cookbook says that the calories per serving for similar recipes have increased as they have revised the cookbook because of increased portion size.


Mostly, I try to portion to fit my storage containers. So the this photos show that portions measure about 3" by 2".




This picture is the messy soup ready to freeze. It will be fine once it is frozen. These are the tools I recommend:

Recommended Portion Tools

Freeze

So, why am I even talking about freezing, throw it in your freezer and you are done, right? Obviously you haven't seen our freezer. All the packages are different sizes, shapes, and textures. I used freezer bags to store the food in the freezer, and they only added to the mess. With all the lost food in our freezer I did not want to forget anything in our freezer. So I attached a whiteboard to the freezer to list my frozen food. I included the date it was frozen, what it was, and how many portions, changing the portions when I ate some. The whiteboard really made it feel like I was ordering off a restaurant menu.

There still were several problems I encountered, frostbite from having to spend 10 minutes fishing in frozen food to find dinner. I am dead serious I would close the freezer and take a break to warm my hands. Next, my 5 year old son wanted his own whiteboard and finally one day helped himself to the one on the freezer. He erased my menu and drew a very pretty picture of me. There went my menu. Also, throwing away all the freezer storage bags was wasteful and started to bother me. There had to be a better way.

Gladware came to the rescue. I wanted something that fit my freezer fairly well, was a popular brand so I could easily buy more later, was cheap and consistent in size to make it easy store. Next came masking tape and Sharpie marker. I want to know what is in the freezer and how long it has been there.

Meal Portion (Yeah)

Now I am able to open the freezer grab 3 to 5 containers clearly labeled and have a meal in 5 minutes. I love soup and it freezes very well in my muffin tins. I will pull out 2 portions of soup and three other portions for dinner. No soup I will eat 4 portions.

I have included a picture of a typical meal, frozen and defrosted.

An average adult male needs 2500 calories a day and 2000 a day calories to lose a pound a week. For an average female it is 1800 calories a day to maintain her weight and 1300 a day to lose weight. 500 calories a day is a couple of sodas or a milk shake at McDonald's, Ouch. I try to eat very little during the day. Less than 500 calories, a yogurt, oatmeal and crackers or nuts. Eat a good diner and save room for graham crackers for desert.

I also play games with myself. First was the new feeling of hunger. It is no more uncomfortable than being stuffed after a meal, just different. I had to get used to it. I try not to eat for an hour after a meal to see if I am hungry or not. I also will play games with time. I will wait just another half hour before eating as an example.

Weight Feedback

I need to know how I am doing with my food portions because it is very difficult to know how many calories you eat and how many you burn. As I have said 500 calories is not a lot to eat a day and it adds up to 1 pound a week, 52 pounds a year. I first started getting on a scale every Monday morning. And that was good, but when I was getting closer to the weight it did not help me a lot. So I moved it to Friday morning.

Now, if I am happy with my weight Friday morning I know I can splurge that weekend (Oreo's and home made Pizza are my current vices). I can also adjust what I eat during the week. Adjusting what I eat is a matter of adding or subtracting portions from my meal.

Please let me know how you do with my system or what I can do to make it a better lifetime weight control system.


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4/27/2009