Best Bets for Portion Control

Portion control, or the act of portioning food into pre-determined amounts, is an integral part of any healthy eating plan. Practicing consistent portion control is one of, if not the most, important habits when your goal is efficient and long-lasting weight loss. The benefits of eating controlled portions are myriad, but one of its biggest draws has to do with your ability to interpret satiety cues. Feelings of satiety — which is the physiological and psychological signals responsible for communicating to the body that it’s full — aren’t immediately felt, making it easy to mindlessly overeat if extra food is placed in front of you. Portion control gives you the opportunity to enjoy the foods you love most, while removing the likelihood of accidentally overindulging.

Making pre-portioned food at home is easy, requiring very little in the way of fancy equipment. When it comes to useful pieces of kitchen equipment for portion control, you’ll want to have a basic kitchen scale and set of resealable plastic containers or jars on hand. A kitchen scale not only offers accuracy, it illustrates what portions look like when a measuring tool is otherwise unavailable.

One of the easiest ways to control portion sizes, with or without a scale, is by preparing recipes that do the pre-portioning work for you. Muffin tins, skewers, parchment packets, ramekins, and even small juice or cocktail glasses are the perfect size for creating portion-controlled versions of all your favourite recipes. Many of the recipes included in this round-up are ideal for freezing, which means a perfectly portioned homemade meal is only a few short moments away at any given time!