Beginner's Guide to Portion Control

Video Transcript

RACHAEL RICHARDSON: Hi. I'm Rachael Richardson and I'm a registered dietician and a licensed nutritionist. I'm from Nutrolution, Inc. and we are located in Miami, Florida. This is a beginner's guide to portion control. Portion control is one of the most importing things that you can do and you really want to focus on keying into your body and intuitive eating, which means eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full. One of the best ways to control your portions is to add lots of vegetables to your food. So, two of the tricks that you can use are starting your meal with a salad, which will kind of take the edge off so that you're not quite as excited about digging into the food, and another trick with vegetables is to make kind of the base of you plate whatever you're eating to be vegetables. So, about half of your plate is vegetables versus that little corner of vegetables that you might see or maybe that you grow up with or that you see in a prepared meal. So, just an example for you: instead of having a stir fry that has a big plate of rice and then you have a little bit of vegetables and a little bit of shrimp or meat, make that plate filled with vegetables and you can make this at home yourself, either skip the rice altogether or just use a small amount of rice and them have the majority be vegetables. Another thing then you can do with vegetables is you can even put main dishes like shrimp scampi over vegetables instead of pasta, so this is going to help your portion control. The five points to remember are, fill your plate with vegetables, if you can, start with the salad, add fat to trigger the satiety, slow down, and make your food look more appealing and complete.