Eating Healthy and Still Gaining Weight? Try Portion Control

The first step to countering this problem is to record exactly what you eat each day, if you are eating for eating's sake then you are definitely going to find that you are going to put on weight, even if it is all healthy food you are eating. The only way to counter this is to portion control.

Portion control does not mean limiting the amount of food you put on your plate, but it does mean controlling the calories you consume daily. Even fruit and vegetables from a greengrocers are labeled with their calorific values nowadays so calculating the amount of calories you consume and where you are consuming them has never been easier.

Calorie counting can become an obsessive disorder! So be careful as a ten minute trip to the corner shop could take an hour whilst you hunt for and read labels. Better to right a list of all the foods (healthy, obviously!) that you enjoy and find all their relevant calorific values on the internet, you will then find it easier to plan shopping trips and menus, and you won't look like a label crazed obsessive whilst shopping anymore.

You could always play tricks on your mind by using a smaller plate, although I got to admit, I'm not a 100% sure of this technique, but some people I know swear by it, so I thought I had better mention it. Apparently, by using a smaller plate, the amount of food you place on it will look huge in comparison to how it would look if it was on a large plate therefore, fooling your mind that you have eaten far more than you actually have, as I said, I'm not a big fan of this idea but if it works for you...great!

Suppressing appetite will help reduce your daily calorie intake and one of the best food groups for this is the raw fruits and vegetables group. These are not known as negative calorie foods but also take such a long to digest that you feel fuller for longer and do not hunger as quick. The term negative calories means that the body expends more calories digesting the food than the food contains; an apple for example contains 100 calories yet the body burns 150 calories digesting it. This means that the process of eating and digesting an apple actually loses you 50 calories!