I tried to stick to suggested serving sizes for a week and I wouldnt do it again
insider.com
insider.com
From their first link.
> Notably, the serving sizes on food labels are primarily based on data about how much food people typically eat, not necessarily the quantity of food the National Institute of Health suggests the average person should eat each day.
And they don’t seem to look at all at nutrition information (intended to be compared to the recommended daily amount of various nutrients) - or even if they’re eating the recommended number of calories per day (which it feels to me like they can’t be).
If you follow a more standard low-calorie diet and eat ~400-500 calories per meal, you can often make fast food work by ordering a kid's meal. Another idea would be to order a single small sandwich without fries and with diet soda or water.
This may not be a satiating meal since it doesn't have enough fiber, but something along the lines of a McDonald's hamburger plus a diet coke would be a "normal" thing you could order while on a diet and still stay within your calorie limits.
The key to it is distributing the food and eating certain type of foods that are very filling. If I'm hungry, I will eat, I can't think properly otherwise.
So I eat about 4 apples throughout the day (different fruit in summer), that's 200 calories. Fruit is probably the key since it stops hunger. For breakfast I have a cup of milk and 30g of carbs, which is either a slice of bread (no sugar) or some no sugar cereals. I'm looking for an alternative to the bread/cereals because it's not very filling or satisfying. That's roughly 200 calories.
Launch and dinner are 130g chicken breast, a lot of veggies. Chicken breast can be replaced with avocado or fish or beef, just keep it at 160 calories. I also put a drop of evoo (extra virgin olive oil) in the salad, half a teaspoon, otherwise it's really hard to eat (60 calories), so that puts the meal at roughly 250 calories if you account for some calories from the veggies.
Total of 900.
I also drink enormous amount of water while on this diet, it helps a lot.
Third day is the hardest, since the body asks for more calories, past the third something happens and body is fine. The major problem is at 4 weeks the body starts looking for alternative flavors, which is hard to do at low calories. Summer helps a lot because the fruit variety is incredible. Strawberries and nectarines are really good! If I save the evoo calories, I go for a bowl of ataulfo mango + nectarines + strawberries + raspberries, it's really sweet and filling.
I should also point out that I never eat at McDonald's either way, not sure what they put in the North American one, probably sugar, but after 1 big mac and 6 chicken nuggets, which puts me over 1000, I was starving. Did it once, would rather not eat than eat Mcdonald.
Thanks for the insight
no source is regarding the you should feel hungry. but then again this follows from this article as a corollary.
[0] and we even know the name of than man
- I could eat something, but I’m good right now <- this should probably be what I feel like most of the day
- Feeling hangry, don’t piss me off!! <- this means I’m probably about to cheat
- Feeling dizzy and lightheaded <- I f*cked up and I should’ve been eating more
[1] I ended up mostly abandoning the decreased calorie consumption; however, I've maintained the portion control and better quality foods.
[2] Looking at it now, I think it might actually be: I don't care as much about eating specific foods that I crave. However, I care a lot about being able to eat foods that I at least somewhat like whenever I want. So I found switching to more healthy foods relatively easy; however, I found cutting out sweet foods completely or eliminating snacking very difficult.
> After learning this, I cut my bagel in half to make it comply
This math doesn't add up. Half the volume (and thus amount of food) of the big bagel is still way more than the full volume of a smaller bagel half the radius.
Same thing with glasses and cups; most mugs in the US today are closer to 14-16oz, not 8oz.
There is a similar comparison with standard coffee drink sizes in the US vs abroad. In the US, a normal "small/healthy-ish" coffee drink is a 12oz latte, but in most of Europe, it's a 6oz cappuccino.
If you want to lose weight via portion control, I highly recommend going to Ikea and spending $50 on smaller dishes, and switching to 6oz cappuccinos when you order coffee out.
I used to drink black coffee, or coffee with a splash of milk.
I switched to drinking lattes when I realised that they have a significant amount of protein and calories in them from the higher milk content.
So I specifically use them to gain weight. It's crazy to me that you'd drink these if you weren't trying to gain weight. It's drinking 100-200 cal.
Many people order 16 or even 20oz lattes with added syrups/sugar. At Starbucks, a caramel macchiato is one of the most popular drinks. It has 250 calories and 33 grams of sugar.
If your caloric needs for the day are 2500 and you eat 10 servings of meals and snacks you'll overshoot.
It honestly doesn't really make sense as a metric. In times when I've been maintaining my weight I've eaten 1500 calories in a meal and met the target for the day. In times when I've been gaining I've eaten meals that wholly consist of green vegetables and essentially have a zero calorie count.
The total is what matters.
- Try to maximize the ratio of protein to carbs in a food.
- For a given number of calories, look for foods with the highest amount of protein. Or somewhat equivalently, for a given amount of protein, look for foods with the lowest number of calories.
To me it feels like these allow me to reason about and compare foods without getting bogged down in things like serving sizes.
Serving sizes are a scam to manipulate nutritional labels. What we need is what Europe has - what percent of food is what. They have that by making the nutritional label for 100g.
Another thing that would be helpful, is not putting raw calories on there, but putting metabolized calories on there. Looking at a nutritional label for dietary fiber makes a person think they're eating a bunch of empty calories, when they get pretty much zero. Why is the nutritional label showing how many calories are released if I burn the food in a fire? Our digestive system is not a BBQ grill.
An excellent diet hack is to have a small protein shake 10 minutes before a meal.
For the cost of 100 calories, you'll reduce hunger considerably.
This seems very wrong...isn't protein the most satiating macronutrient?
I'm actually trying to gain weight and if I have a protein shake in the morning I could easily just neglect eating a real breakfast for hours.
Sticking to portion sizes is undeniably hard.
This is typical of public health organizations, they completely ignore reality which actually makes their advice worse than useless because people ignore it altogether instead of at least using it as a guideline. Sort of like when you go somewhere that says the speed limit is 5 mph. It's not even possible to drive that slowly so you just ignore it entirely.
A sort of related article this made me think of: Ultra-Cautious CDC Wants You To Cook Your Prosciutto and Salami https://reason.com/2021/08/25/ultra-cautious-cdc-wants-you-t...
That article is pretty silly. There was a salmonella outbreak, so for a brief time, for a specific batch from a specific brand the CDC advised people to cook those meats.
That outbreak put 12 people in the hospital. Salmonella outbreaks kill people (though not this one in particular - probably because of this recall), especially children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised.
And Reason's objection is, "no one wants to do that?" This just really misunderstands how this works. Grocery stores, restaurants, school cafeterias, and nursing homes around the country threw out the contaminated meat, and it probably saved lives. It almost certainly kept people out of the hospital. (I took a ServSafe food safety course, the sort you'd take to be a restaurant manager or server, and there was a big focus on understanding & actioning on these CDC reports.)
Maybe individuals didn't choose to cook their meats. Whatever. Most of it was probably thrown away before they had the chance to roll those dice.
In light of the life saving nature of this system, Reason's criticism is incredibly shallow. Naturally they spin it into some antimask rubbish.
(I imagine the real reason for the ridiculous portion sizes is that