Weekly Meeting Topic : Get Wise About Size

I do think that this week's topic is a week or two too late, in all honesty this should of been the topic BEFORE Thanksgiving.  Each year at Thanksgiving we're given the talk about the holiday and the food, but perhaps we should focus more on portion, portion size and portion control.  We all tend to overeat during the major holidays.

This week I went to my regular Tuesday meeting, it was a good sized group but I really did notice/realize that this group is mainly ladies who are much older than me.  I think this is why I'm falling in love with the Saturday morning meetings, its a much younger, more lively group.  Not all members of the Saturday meeting are young we're a good mix, but I noticed on Tuesdays I'm the minority.

Anyhow onto the topic at hand : Get Wise About Size

My meeting leader made a good point to start off with, that our choice starts with the size of your plate.  No matter how small or how big that plate is we seem to fill our plate no matter what!  Its just a natural tendency we have, we hate to see our plates sitting empty or with so much space between the items on the plate.  When it comes to learning portion control, this is a great place to start... a smaller plate, instead of that massive dinner plate which is so common today!  Of course you have to resist the temptation to pile that smaller plate a mile high!

Less IS More!  Portion Control Equals

• up sized success
• super sized satisfaction
• maximized feelings of control

There really is nothing more powerful that the feeling of success, the belief in yourself that YES you can do this!  The excitement of seeing that scale going down week, after week.  Now do realize that the scale doesn't go down every week, there will be weeks that your weight is up... that's a fact and we have to turn these gains into learning opportunities.  There will be weeks where your losses are small we have to take every loss the big or the small and celebrate them!

So how are the different ways we can practice portion control?

• Be aware of what a serving is
• Weigh and measure your portions, when you eyeball it your portions slowly start to get a little bigger.  If you find you're not loosing as fast as you'd like or perhaps you've had a gain, go back to basics, weigh and measure!
• Keep it simple
• Know your visual cues, for example the palm of your hand/deck of cards is one 3oz meat serving, your fist is a cup and so on.  This is great for those cases when we can't weigh and measure our own food.
• Know that you can have larger portions of low point, filling foods
• Plan ahead
• When eating out doggie bag 1/2 of your meal before you even take a bite!

My leader had two good quotes at the end of our meeting :

"To lengthen thy life lessen thy meals"

"Its not what you give up its what you get back"

On Tuesday morning I weighed myself like I always have to do my weekly "weigh in" for Weight Watchers e-tools (this subscription has been worth every penny if you're an online junkie like me).  So my total loss for the last week has been 4.5 lbs!  I am officially UNDER my goal weight!  Now if my body will co-operate I'd love to loose 5.5 more lbs to get to my Weight Watchers Goal Weight!  This would be such an achievement for me, there's nothing I'd like more in this world than to become a Weight Watchers Leader.  No matter how much knowledge I have, how much passion I have for the program and the amount of success I have had, until I'm within their weight range they won't even look at me as an employee.

I think that's part of the reason why I started this blog, to hopefully help and inspire a few others out there who are struggling with their weight.  My biggest step was admitting that I needed help to loose weight and stepping into that first meeting.  I hope you can find the help and support you need to complete your journey.  If you ever need a cheerleader, someone you need to talk to or bounce an idea off of, my e-mail address in my profile don't hesitate to drop me a line.

This week so far has been very good for me, I'm finally feeling re-energized!  I am wanting to go to my workouts and I'm enjoying them.  I realized tonight when I wrote down on my calendar what type of exercise I did today that for the first time in ages I've done some sort of activity seven days in a row.  Its not been all going to the gym or going for a run (but on the other hand I've done over 12KMs so far this week), one night was 4 hours cleaning my house... yes that is exercise.  While my friend Bonnie was here we went for a nice walk with our cameras.  The key is to move more and eat less!

I hope everyone goes through this week feeling as great as I have!