My friend Bianca and her parents moved to live near us after leaving Italy nearly twenty years ago. We are the ’sisters’ that our parents failed to provide and we have always shared our ups and downs. Recently, Bianca has been the happiest I can remember as an adult when she solved her long term ‘weight worry’ by learning about portion control - how to manage the intake of her food portions on a daily basis.
Neither of Bianca’s parents has ever gained extra weight and they could never fully understand the cause of her weight gain after she left home. They did rightly suspect though, that she had started eating larger portions her favorite Italian pizza and pasta more often and that these had started to show around her hips and stomach.
Bianca lost a few pounds when she married Joe but in her busy life as a wife, worker and mother she has never been able to successfully manage her body weight with any given diet. She has tried every approach and even every fad diet, cutting out each major food group at some stage. She always concentrated on the type of food she ate (or did not eat), rather than on whether she was eating the right amount of these food portions.
Bianca says that she stumbled across how to eat smart and gain control of her weight. Previous diets had failed because each was too complex and they all left her feeling exhausted. To avoid this and extra shopping and cooking, she decided to eat the same nutritious food she prepared for her family every day just less of it.
She needed to make sure that the food portions she ate included all the nutrients needed in a healthy body. She checked the findings of well known health authorities including The American Diabetes Association, The American Heart Association and The American Medical Association and noticed they all recommended a diet containing food from each of the food groups for successful loss of weight.
The key to Bianca’s success was her approach to the size of her food portions. To solve the problem of how much food to eat, she used the circular design on her Italian dinner plates. This circle inside the lip of her plate governed the magnitude of her food portions at lunch and dinner the extent of her portion control.
Joe and their adolescent sons enjoyed regular daily meals and Bianca ate the same meal but she reduced the size of her food portions so that these were always contained by the blue circle. She made time for a healthy breakfast and prepared portion snacks of fruit, nuts and vegetables in the event that her tummy rumbled before the next meal.
Bianca found that she was able to lose weight consistently over the past twelve months and has never looked healthier or happier. She has taken the reins of her life and has resumed European Eating the way she did at home. Her food portions are smaller, she enjoys the taste of food and the social experience of meal times and she looks forward to an occasional treat.
Bianca still revels at how amazingly straight forward her weight loss was and looks forward to a longer life where she will be less likely to develop heart disease, diabetes or suffer a stroke. She is an advocate of portion control of food as the solution to obesity and as a long term approach to maintaining a healthy body. She even includes some tiramisu as part of her food portions now and then to satisfy her insatiable sweet tooth!
