A subtle difference between portion sizes and weight loss

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4th Apr 2016 12:32 (UTC)

With so many diets to choose from, weight loss can be a minefield and desperation can lead to faddy diets which can challenge even the most conscientious person.

So why make it so difficult? Here's the thing, we know that the only proven method of weight loss is the energy balance. By that we mean, calories in and calories out. The RDA for women is 2,000 and 2,500 a day for men, that information is as old as the hills and written on nearly every nutritional label.

We now know to lose 1-2lb a week we need to reduce our calorie intake by 500 calories which we can do several ways. We can and probably should cut out or back on fatty suggary foods, cake, pizza, chips, ice cream etc. We can do this by analysing a typical day's food and writing down everything we eat, maybe even over a 5 day period to give a clearer position. If we could go a stage further and weigh every morsel and note the calorific content all the better, hard work but worth it to give your self a grasp of what and how much you are eating and then have that light bulb moment, when you realise where all the weight has come from. It's 5 days hard work but a lesson worth learning because every body has a different sense of what constitutes a portion size for maintaining a healthy weight and what constitutes a portion size if you want to lose weight. Hence why the Diet Plate is called the Diet Plate and not a portion plate!

The Diet Plate is specifically designed to cut 500 calories a day from your diet in the most painless way possible. You can eat exactly what you love to cook, from a salmon wasabi burger to summer chicken wrapped in Parma ham. Choose any of the wonderful recipes to be found in BBC Good Food, Great British Food Magazine, Woman and Home, Delicious and the many more foodie magazines available, and just arrange your meal according to the food group portion delineated by the design of the plate. If you're not that great a cook, the supermarkets do some lovely meals in the chiller section, so just portion them out in the same way.

You enjoy all of the taste and non of the pain, the calories are counted for you, somewhere between 1200 - 1550 a day on the female system depending on what you like to cook and 1500 - 1900 calories on the male system. It's as we say in our tag line, "Portion Control Made Easy!" All that is left to do, is watch the weight come off.

TOP TIP: If you want to maintain goal weight use the Male Version, the calories are correct for a female RDA with a little treat thrown in!