Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Use Portion Control to Lose Weight For Good

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Weight loss advice has been muddled for decades now. For example, in the 90’s, we were told that all we had to do to get the body of our dreams is eat as little dietary fat as possible. That didn’...t work. Now we’re being told we can eat a snootful of fat every day so long as we restrict our carbohydrate and sugar intake. That’s not working, either. Hormones…artificial sweeteners…chemicals and “toxins”…genetically modified foods…wheat and gluten…they’re all to blame for our collective fatness, according to one “guru” or another. And the weight loss solutions they offer? Restrictive dieting, of course, which, in many cases, means facing down a short list of what you can eat with everything else being strictly verboten. Ironically, and fortunately for you, they’re all missing the forest for the trees. You see, losing weight is much simpler than you’ve been led to believe, and in this podcast, we’re going to talk about a weight loss and maintenance strategy that not only makes sense and is supported by good science, but actually works in the real world: portion control. The reason portion control works is simple. It strikes at the heart of why our weight changes for better or worse, which is the fact the quantity, not quality, of the food we eat matters most. Yes, when we’re talking weight, what we eat matters much less than how much. Couple that with the fact that people’s overall food portion sizes keep getting bigger, leading them to passively eat more and more calories, and it’s no wonder that obesity rates are rising faster than a Viagra erection. Research shows that portion size is one of the strongest environmental factors contributing to weight gain, and by the end of this podcast, you’re going to know why, how it works, and how to use it as a tool for not just losing weight but preventing unwanted weight gain as well. Let’s get started. 5:08 - Why does portion control matter? 8:51 - Why do we accidentally overeat? 16:51 - How do internal cues cause overeating? 21:44 - How can I use portion control to my advantage? 28:20 - How can I apply portion control at restaurants? --- Mentioned on The Show: Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://legionathletics.com/shop/ --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. I'm Mike Matthews and if this were a live stream, I could call it a Quarren stream, but it's not. It's just a podcast. And we're going to talk about portion control in this episode. Something that is good to know about in general if you're into fitness, especially if you don't want to always be weighing and measuring out your food and you want to be able to just maintain a certain body composition, but is also something that can be particularly helpful right now. A lot of people are asking me for some help about how to cut down on the overeating now that a lot of us are sitting at home bored. Now, not me. I can work from home just as efficiently and effectively as my office, but I understand
Starting point is 00:00:54 that's not the case for a lot of people. And so a lot of people are stuck at home, bored, surrounded by food. And I actually am going to write an article on that topic specifically, and I'll probably turn it into a podcast. But until then, I thought I would start with portion control because this is a good way to curb the pandemic overeating and also to just have generally in your repertoire for when you don't want to strictly follow a meal plan and you want to be able to lose weight. And it works to a point. There is a point where you actually do have to follow a strict meal plan if you want to get really lean. But if you just want to lose a bit of weight, you can definitely do it with just portion control. And if you want to maintain a body
Starting point is 00:01:39 composition, portion control can help with that as well. Now, why does portion control work? Well, it works because it helps us control how much food we eat. And if you're not on board with that, if you don't understand energy balance and how that relates to weight loss, weight gain, and weight maintenance, I recommend that you pause this episode and you go find the episode that I recorded on energy balance. If you just hit my feed and search for it, you will find it, listen to it, and then come back to this episode because I'm going to assume I don't want to take too much time going back over the basics of energy balance because I've done that in a number of episodes and I've done that in depth in one long form episode that is only on energy balance. And so that's why portion control works, of course,
Starting point is 00:02:25 because it helps you regulate your calories. And if you are not good at controlling your portions, if you don't know or apply some of the stuff I'm going to share in this episode, it can be hard to not overeat. And research shows that people's general food portion sizes have been getting bigger and bigger for some time now, and that has led to more and more passive overeating. So people's general calorie intake has gone up over the last several decades, and physical activity levels have gone down. And some research suggests that those factors alone, the ever-increasing calorie intake over the last several decades, coupled with the ever-decreasing physical activity levels, can explain almost wholly the rise in obesity, why people are just getting fatter and fatter, at least here in America specifically.
Starting point is 00:03:19 And to that point, research also shows that portion size is one of the strongest environmental factors that contributes to weight gain. And by the end of this podcast, you're going to know why, you're going to know how it works, and you're going to know how to use portion control as a tool for not just losing weight when you want to trim up, I guess you could say, but also preventing unwanted weight gain when you want to just maintain your body composition. Now, before we get to the show, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements,
Starting point is 00:04:10 fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and dose in every product of mine is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent, no proprietary blends, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check it out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase, then you will get double reward points on your entire order, which is essentially getting 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, that URL is
Starting point is 00:04:57 legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Okay, so let's start by quickly talking about why portion control matters. The biggest reason is multiple studies that span decades have proven the link between larger portions and overeating and of course obesity. So basically, the more food you are served in a sitting or the more food you serve yourself, the bigger your portion is, the more likely you are to eat too much. And if you do that too often, then you just gain more and more weight. You get fatter and fatter, right? And thanks to something researchers refer to as a mindless margin, it's very easy to slightly under or overeat without realizing it. And by slightly, I mean 15 to 20% per meal. And to put that in perspective, let's say you burn
Starting point is 00:05:58 about 2000 calories per day, which is your average, probably 150, 160 pound guy who's not too active, but not completely sedentary. And of course, then that's what you'd have to eat to maintain your weight. If you overate by just 15% every day, so that's about 300 calories more than you burn, you'd be faced with about 30 pounds of weight gain by the end of the year. And you'd get there without noticing it probably. You wouldn't feel like you had been overeating in the day-to-day. It's in that mindless margin. Now, if you think that this is unlikely in the real world, that our bodies are better at auto-regulating the amount of food that we eat, think again, because a number of studies have proven that people do
Starting point is 00:06:45 consume more calories overall when they're offered larger portions, even when they're not hungry, and better, even when the food doesn't taste good. If outsized portions are put in front of us every day, research shows that many of us will just happily eat it all, never compensating by eating less on the whole or moving more to burn off those additional calories. And when you combine that inability to regulate calorie intake with our mindless margin tendencies, you've got a recipe for easy and sustained weight gain. And eventually, of course, that turns into obesity. And if it goes on for too long, morbid obesity. Luckily, however, the reverse is also true. When we learn to right-size our portions, research shows that many of us will just instinctively consume fewer calories. And
Starting point is 00:07:39 the closer we can bring our calorie intake to our expenditure over time, the better we can maintain our body composition. And of course, if we want to lose weight, then we need our calorie expenditure to exceed our calorie intake over time. And this is why portion control is so important. Once you understand how to control your food portions, and once you have a heightened awareness of how many calories you're eating and burning, you can control your body weight and your body composition with ease. You don't have to strictly follow the meal plan, eat the same foods every meal every day. You don't have to continue weighing and measuring everything or using an app to track your intake. Even if you're just eyeballing, you can learn to eat according to your body's natural signals of hunger and fullness.
Starting point is 00:08:27 Now, if you are about to tune out because you think that we're getting to the part about half-empty plates with quarter-sized dollops of food, fear not. Porsche Control is about much more than just eating less of everything. It's about understanding the quantitative differences in the kinds of foods and the drinks that you're choosing and then adjusting your intake accordingly. So let's break this down piece by piece. Let's talk about why we accidentally overeat first. So why does this happen? Simple question. Many people think that we overeat just because we're hungry, right? No, not right. Actual physiological hunger and its opposite satiety or fullness plays a pretty small role actually in how much food we
Starting point is 00:09:12 eat. And this is why weight loss and maintenance strategies centered around just blunting or controlling hunger rarely work. Instead, research shows that a mix of external factors, internal cues, and social signals are collectively corrupting our natural eating instincts. Let's break down some of the environmental factors first. Our eating habits are heavily influenced by our environment, there's no question. And three of the biggest factors are packaging. You see, portion sizes have been on the rise for decades now, and this is most obvious in food packaging. Ever notice the tiny bags of chips near the grocery store checkouts? They usually cost a dollar or so, and they contain the standard one ounce serving of potato chips. And they look unappetizingly small, right? They seem like the right choice,
Starting point is 00:10:07 maybe for your kid's lunchbox, but not for you. And so compare those to what you see on the displays at convenience stores, for example, you know, the jumbo super grab bag. Well, that size has taken over. I mean, that's like the norm now for portion sizing of chips. There's the value-sized candy bars and cereal boxes, right? And it's getting harder and harder to find 12-ounce cans of soda and 8-ounce energy drinks now, both been replaced by larger bottles and cans. And research shows that constant exposure to these larger and ever-growing portion sizes has led to what scientists refer to as portion distortion. That is, us consumers, we tend to assume that the entire package of a food or a drink is the right size. And then we psychologically
Starting point is 00:11:01 prime ourselves to eat or drink it all in one go. Dining out is another major environmental factor. Many dieters feel that they can make the right portion choices at home, but then they overeat greatly when they eat out. And this has been shown in research. We've all experienced it, but there's some science to lend insight to this as well. One of the issues is restaurants tend to vastly over-serve, which makes it really easy to eat egregious amount of calories. A good case in point here is a study that was conducted by scientists at Tufts University that involved the analysis of 360 dinner entrees at 123 non-chain
Starting point is 00:11:40 restaurants in San Francisco, Boston, and Little Rock between 2011 and 2014. And what the researchers found is the restaurant dishes contained on average about 1,200 calories and that American, Italian, and Chinese restaurants were the worst offenders with an average of nearly 1,500 calories per meal. Calorically speaking, then there's really not much of a difference between fast food and full service dining. That's pretty wild, right? Even more flagrant offenders can be found in a 2014 analysis of restaurant foods from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. And the Cheesecake Factory was a standout here. Their menu was impressive. Check this out.
Starting point is 00:12:25 They made a brûlée French toast with a side of bacon that weighed in at nearly 2,800 calories, 93 grams of saturated fat. That's just saturated fat, not total fat. And 24 teaspoons of sugar. They also offered a creamy farfalle pasta with chicken and roasted garlic, which was a bit lighter at just 2,400 calories and 63 grams of saturated fat. And let's not forget that those are just individual entrees, which for many people aren't the entirety of their meals. They're cheap meals, right? You add in some bread, you add in an
Starting point is 00:13:05 appetizer, you add in some dessert, and now you're looking at a cheat meal of horrific proportions. I mean, you can get as high as 5,000, 6,000 calories in one sitting. And you better believe that portion distortion plays into this. Not unlike retail packaging, there's definitely a lot of that going on here. The more food we're served at a restaurant, the more we tend to eat. Now, why are restaurants doing this? Do the restaurant moguls just want us all to be forever fat? Alas, we can only blame ourselves for this trend because too many diners care much too much about food quantity over quality. And well, we have reaped the whirlwind on this one. And if you want to see this in action, just head over to Yelp and find a high-end fine dining restaurant, ideally one
Starting point is 00:13:57 that specializes in small plates, tapas, or other decorative presentations of food. Basically, go look at some Michelin-starred restaurants and look at the one-star reviews. And I will bet you, dollar to donuts, there's at least one, but probably many more, person griping about how the portion sizes were too small. You know, rip off, tiny little plate, not enough food. Really? How much fucking pork belly do you need to slingshot into your face hole to be satisfied? Now, imagine if a restaurant like Olive Garden did the same thing. Your waiter walks up to your table and hands you a perfectly portioned two ounce serving of pasta with a, you know, a half of a cup of sauce on top. And oh, just because this meal is so calorically balanced, I'll throw in a bit of a, maybe a breadstick, like half of a breadstick
Starting point is 00:14:51 for you to enjoy too. Yeah, jaws would drop, bills would be left unpaid, locations would wind up boarded up, vandalized. And so anyway, my point is we have collectively come to expect jumbo portions at restaurants and we happily eat them. Another major environmental factor can lead to overeating. And I'm talking about TV, dining companions, video games, social media, YouTube. Those are the most common culprits. See, what happens is when you're focused on something besides your dinner plate, you spend less time processing the actual eating experience. So for example, by engaging in conversation or getting caught up in a TV drama, you are too distracted to think about the way that you feel while you're eating. And to make it worse, research shows that we also often forget what we have just eaten when we're
Starting point is 00:15:57 distracted. So maybe just an hour after eating a pizza, if we're in front of the TV, we might see a commercial for our favorite nibbles. And then back to the kitchen, we go for a snack, not because we're hungry, but just because it feels like the right thing to do. We want something tasty in our mouth. So the solution here is simple. It's just to be more mindful when you eat. Slow down, focus your attention on the sensory details of what you're eating, the taste, the texture, the smell of the food, the sounds around you, your internal barometer of fullness. You can pay attention to how full you feel, how much fuller you're getting. Try to enjoy every bite. Don't just slurp the food down and try to stop when you're satisfied, not stuffed. And if you just get in the habit of doing those things,
Starting point is 00:16:46 if you practice that, you'll become a better eater. It is kind of a skill that you have to learn if you haven't learned it. Okay, let's move on to internal sensory cues and overeating. So we have actual physiological hunger, and that is different than mental yearnings or cravings. And research shows that the physiological hunger may not be a big contributor to our overeating, but there are plenty of internal cues that contribute. So for example, the anticipation of food conjures up all kinds of vivid images of how a meal is going to smell and taste and how much we're going to enjoy it. And this is a food's palatability. It's complex mix of smell, texture, temperature, and even the sound produced while eating. That
Starting point is 00:17:34 has been researched. Food scientists have figured out, for example, with potato chips, the exact right amount of crunch that not only feels the best in our mouth, but also sounds the best. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into engineering a lot of these hyperpalatable foods. And anyway, the more delicious food you have around you, the more primed you're going to be to have titillating thoughts about it and to eat more of it. And what's funny is those thoughts can make us think we're hungry even when we're not. And that makes it even harder to know when we're eating to satisfy a physiological need or a psychological need or emotional need or to just fill dead time and because we're bored. And this is why imagining the pleasure of eating is enough
Starting point is 00:18:27 to make us forget about our diets and head for the freshly baked cookie or the bag of, or bags, of crispy Cheetos. Social standards are another powerful internal cue that affects how we eat. If you are in the US, you are surely aware that calories don't count on Thanksgiving or Super Bowl Sunday or over the Christmas holiday or on the day when maybe your favorite college football team is playing or, or, or, you get it. There is no shortage of days where people will allow themselves to fire hose food into their faces. Why? Well, we seem to always be able to make room for more food when it seems normal to do so. So without a firm grasp on how servings relate to calories and how calorie intake relates to body weight and weight gain, the amount we feel we should eat in a given situation is going to fluctuate depending on what we perceive to be typical or acceptable. And research shows that
Starting point is 00:19:31 some of these circumstances that influence what we feel is normal or acceptable include how much we have served in the past. We tend to think about that. So if it's a football game, then how much food do we serve ourselves in a previous football game that we watched? What quantity of food we usually buy or serve? How much food we have on hand? As well as the behavior of our dining companions, because many of us will unconsciously just imitate their eating habits if we're around them. And notice what's missing from that list is how hungry we are or how hungry we even think we are. It's more about just what seems like the right amount of food at that time. here on the podcast and elsewhere. And if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements,
Starting point is 00:20:37 including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points.
Starting point is 00:21:32 So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. All right, so let's switch gears here and talk about now how to use portion control to your advantage, how to use it to lose weight, how to use it to maintain weight, because it's not very practical to just tell someone to eat less when eating large portions of everything is so ingrained.
Starting point is 00:22:05 Studies show that we naturally want to eat the same amount of food by weight each day. So trying to simply slash that in half is probably going to leave you with an appetite like a chainsaw. Instead, you can satisfy both your need for food volume and calorie control by increasing your portions of certain foods while reducing others. Basically, by making smart substitutions, you can eat more or less the same amount of food for a lot less calories. And that will help you maintain a more desirable body weight or even lose weight if you are trying to lose weight. So for example, if you load your plate with low calorie, high fiber, high water foods like fruits and vegetables, it's going to be filling but far lighter than meats, grains, and starches. And if you give
Starting point is 00:22:56 the least space on your plate to the most calorie dense foods, which are going to be the ones that are high in fats and or sugars, that also helps tremendously. So let's take a closer look at this. Let's take a closer look at how to get your portions working for you both at home and out on the town when we can do that again. Let's talk about home first because, well, all of our meals, at least most of our meals, probably for most of us, unless you're getting stuff delivered, are going to be prepped and eaten at home. And when that is the case, you want to make your kitchen portion control friendly. Now, the first step here is learning what appropriate portion sizes of various foods are. And to do this, you're going to need three things. The first one
Starting point is 00:23:40 is some measuring cups and a food scale. Now, see if you can correctly eyeball a cup of oatmeal or a couple tablespoons of peanut butter without these, without using the measuring cup for the oatmeal and the little spoon for the peanut butter. It's not as easy as you think because the cup on the package of the oatmeal assumes a certain weight of oatmeal, certain number of grams of oatmeal, and your cup might be quite a bit more than that. You're also going to need a calorie counting website like Calorie King or Calorie Count. Now, you're probably going to be surprised by how many calories your favorite foods have per serving if you haven't done this before. And you also need
Starting point is 00:24:21 an understanding of approximately how many calories you're burning every day. And this, of course, is the linchpin. If you have no clue as to your energy expenditure, you have no clue as to how much you can or should be eating, regardless of portion sizes. For example, should you eat two or three ounces of pasta at dinner, one or two pieces of toast at breakfast, two or three scoops of protein powder after working out and so on. Now, if you are not sure about how to determine how much energy you are burning, I think again, the energy balance podcast that I mentioned earlier has all that information. If not, just head over to legionathletics.com, search for TDEE, total daily energy expenditure,
Starting point is 00:25:05 and you'll find an article I wrote on that specifically. And it also has a calculator. I don't think I've recorded a podcast specifically on TDEE. Now, I've mentioned a number of times in this podcast that you're not going to have to measure and track everything you eat always, but it is a good way to get a handle on your portions. It's really probably the quickest and easiest way to do it because once you've done it for just a couple weeks and have gone through the trial and error period, you get a pretty good sense quickly of how much or little of everything you should be eating. This approach is also better than following just generalized portion
Starting point is 00:25:45 guidelines based on hand or fist size amounts of food or plate apportioning because what I'm recommending is more accurate and it allows you to make better eating decisions on the fly. You might also want to rethink your dinnerware because research shows that the larger your dinnerware is, so we're talking about the plates and bowls and glasses and even silverware, the more food you will tend to eat. And if you drink caloric beverages, which is a bad idea, by the way, I generally recommend staying away from that unless you are having trouble eating enough calories. The same applies to glassware. We tend to pour larger portions into shorter, wider glasses than into taller, narrower glasses. And some other easy wins are pre-plating your main entrees, starches, and grains in the kitchen before you head to the table. So
Starting point is 00:26:41 don't bring the big pot to the table and then plate it at the table because you'll be more likely to go back into the pot. Another good tip is to serve salads, vegetables, and fruit family style at the table so that you take more. Because again, those are the types of foods you want to be eating more of, not only because they are high in fiber and water tend to fill you up for a lot fewer calories than other foods, but they also contain a lot of vital nutrition. You should be eating a couple, two or three servings of fruit every day and at least the same amount of vegetables. I recommend double that, four to six servings of vegetables per day. Another tip is to never eat foods out of the package unless you plan on eating the entire lot because we've all been there.
Starting point is 00:27:26 We know that once you get going, it can be hard to stop. So the better way to do it is transfer the snack, however much you're going to eat, to a plate or a bowl and then eat it. You can also pre-measure your dinner portions in advance like you would do when you are meal prepping. So you put away the leftovers then before you eat your portion. So you decide this is how much I'm going to eat and you put away the leftovers and then you eat. You can pre-measure out single serving bags or containers of snacks like nuts and chips. That works well. You can also keep tempting snacks like chips and cookies and baked things and cereal boxes in cabinets and off the
Starting point is 00:28:07 counters out of sight. Basically, research shows that the less often you see the foods that you tend to eat too much of or that just tend to contribute to overeating, the less likely you are to eat them. Okay, so that's home portion control. Let's talk about restaurants. We will be able to eat in restaurants again at some point, hopefully soon. And don't. That is, you're going to want to stay away from the supersized portions when you go to restaurants. You're going to want to stick mainly to lower calorie foods that you can find on the menu, and you're going to want to limit your intake of higher calorie ones and so forth. And a few additional specific tips here are to ignore the allure of the value size option. And especially at a fast food restaurant, do you want to supersize that, right? You want to also order the smallest size
Starting point is 00:29:12 offered. It also can help if you decide it in advance to take half of your meal home for leftovers. Because again, so many restaurants serve so much more food than is actually necessary. And if you pay attention to when you're eating a lot of food, at first it's delicious and it is very pleasurable to eat, but that quickly falls off. For me, for example, if I am eating ice cream, these days I eat Dolcezza ice cream. I like the butter pecan in particular. It's 500 calories a pint instead of a thousand for something like Talenti, which is also delicious, but double the calories. And I think Dolcezza is way better than Halo Top or Enlightened or any of the other low calorie, higher protein ice cream options out there. So much so that I didn't believe the calories of Dolcezza at first, and I still don't know if I do. It's too good for 500 calories a pint. But anyway, when I'm eating it, I'll find that the first half of the pint is very nice.
Starting point is 00:30:12 It's delicious and it gets the dopamine flowing, right? But then the second half of the pint, which I always finish, is markedly less stimulating. It still tastes good, but I no longer feel compelled to keep eating it. I'm just kind of eating it because I've allotted this into my calories. I need the calories anyway. It still does taste good, but it doesn't have that spark of joy to use a Marie Kondo-ism. And so anyway, that's why committing to taking half of your meal home from a restaurant for leftovers can work nicely, assuming what you're eating makes for good leftovers. But if you do that, you'll find that, or you'll probably find that you really enjoy
Starting point is 00:30:57 eating it the first time and you eat half of it. And then when you have the leftovers, you get to repeat that experience as opposed to really enjoying the first half and kind of just working your way through the second half because it's there. Another tip when you're eating out that can help bring down your calorie intake is to share with other people, offer other people to try your meal. You can get rid of half of the calories that way if you don't want to take them home. Another tip is to decline the side that comes with an entree, and especially if you can't get a lower calorie option. And finally, eat an appetizer or two as your main course. This is something I'll often do. If there's not an
Starting point is 00:31:35 entree that really appeals to me, and if there are a couple appetizers that appeal to me more, I'll just have a few appetizers and maybe some dessert and that's it. And in many cases, in many restaurants, the appetizers are, I think, more like entrees. I mean, the amount of food that you get with some appetizers is a lot. And speaking of dessert, actually one more tip on that is to just keep in mind how many calories are in desserts in restaurants. They're often loaded with calories. You can assume probably about 50 calories per spoon of pretty much anything. So just think about that. And if you want to ignore all of that and just enjoy yourself when you go eat out, I totally understand. But we are talking about controlling your portions, controlling your
Starting point is 00:32:24 calorie intake. And I would argue that if you try doing some of these things and it became your routine when you eat out, as opposed to just gorging, you will find that you're not missing out on anything actually by making smarter portion control choices. In fact, you might actually enjoy the experience more because you are not eating to the point of overwhelm and you leave feeling satisfied physically and emotionally because there is, of course, emotional satisfaction that comes with eating without maybe any of the lingering feelings of guilt for having eaten thousands of excess calories. All right. So those are all of the important things I wanted to share with you on portion control. And the fact is those of us who want to eat responsibly are definitely up against a lot. Cues to eat are everywhere, making it all too easy to overeat. And until there is really a systemic shift in food marketing and food awareness and food engineering, until there's a real sea change, our dietary fate is squarely in our hands.
Starting point is 00:33:34 And we need to be conscious of that. And making good portion control decisions, developing good portion control skills gives us a major advantage in this struggle, I guess is probably the right word for it. Portion control allows us to control our calories without having to be too neurotic about what goes onto our plates and into our mouths. And just because it's simple doesn't mean it will come quickly. It may take some time to unlearn some of the bad habits maybe you've established and tune out and ultimately disarm the external and the internal triggers that conspire against us, that push us to eat more than we need to. But stick with it and you will get it in time. You will hone your eye and you'll hone your instincts for right-sizing your
Starting point is 00:34:26 portions, for buying, ordering, and cooking in a way that supports your long-term fitness goals and allows you again to lose weight if you want to lose weight and maintain a body composition if you want to maintain a body composition. And in time, it will just become second nature. You won't even think about it anymore. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from, because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast in whatever app you're using to listen.
Starting point is 00:35:29 And you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

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