Should you eat whatever you want just in small portions to lose weight if you’re overweight?

Yes and no. Obvious cutting higly caloric food to small portions is a way to eat less calories. But the solution is simplistic anyhow.

In first place, how small a portion do you want to eat? Suppose that you burn 2000 calories per day (it’s the average for women and, as usual, it’s a nice, well-rounded number that allows us to make easy calculations), but you are currently eating 2500 calories per day, so you have a surplus of 500 calories each day. In order to lose weight you have to eat around 1800 calories per day, that’s 700 calories less than you do each day.

This is actually more like 30 grams, but you get the idea

Now, suppose you like pasta (and I love pasta). A large bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce can have some 6–700 calories, which is a lot. The easy solution would be to cut your portion to 50 grams, which is the diet portion sugested by many diets. That would be some 200 calories: about one third of your previous one. The problem is that such a dish can also get digested pretty fast, assimilated, and leaving you feeling starving.

To prevent you from feeling starving, you would need to bolster up your meal by both adding something that helps it become more filling. A good example of this something is vegetables, which are light in calories. If instead of using a tomato sauce you use a lot of vegetables (such as artichokes, broccoli, zucchini, asparagus, etc.) sautéed in just a small amount of oil with garlic, chili, and some of the pasta cooking water you get a much larger plate of food without adding a lot of ingredients. Even more interesting, the fibers in the vegetables make absorbing the calories in this dish slower, so that you can feel fuller for longer.

Pasta with artichokes

Besides, there’s the nutritional issue. Even if you eat a lot of “unhealthy” food, the very fact that you eat lots of food that is poor in vitamins and minerals provides you with most of what you need in terms of micronutrients. But if you reduce your portions, you also reduce the amount of vitamins and minerals you eat, so you must introduce extra vegetables and fruit or you can following the Eat The Fat Off eBook.

A small portion of a pasta with vegetables, followed by a small portion of meat, fish, or one egg (or also a lean diary), a salad, and a portion of fruit are a great diet meal that will keep you from starving. It sill includes that food you liked above all (in our hypothesis), but also proteins, a lot of fibers, a little natural sugar from the fruit. not just smaller portions of what you like, but a general change in how you compose your meals.

And you likely will need a couple free meals (I don’t like the concept of cheat meals: free meals are necessary in a diet) when you eat anything you want with no regards for the diet. These are necessary to prevent you from getting bored in your diet, to keep you in a good spirit, to allow you to take part to family events and meet your friends, to keep your metabolism highier.