This is Why Portion Controlled Meals Are Superb For Weight Loss

Understanding Portion Control for Effective Weight Loss​

If we look at portion-controlled meals, what we are trying to do is to ensure that the portion size contains enough energy and nutrients for you to survive and be healthy, but not so much that your body can store some of the portions. Stored portions cause weight gain! I like to look at the nutritional density of food, and we can calculate our portion sizes around this. If we look for foods that contain a large amount of low-energy, tasty food, we can serve relatively large portions of this. However, when we look at foods that contain a lot of energy per unit, we need very small portions of this.

The Components of a Well-Balanced Meal​

If we break a portion of food down into its components, if contains in order of importance:

• Protein – you cannot store this and need protein in every meal to ensure health.
• Lipids – also known as fats- have a huge range of forms, with some being essential to health. High-quality lipids are important to health, and low-quality lipids are not. We will go into this later.
• Vitamins – these are essential to your survival and every meal needs to include things that contain vitamins in the highest density, and also a vitamin supplement.
• Other nutrients – minerals such as calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and phytonutrients such as antioxidants. These are important for all your enzymes to work properly.
• Fiber – this provides bulk and feeds your gut microbiome. This is an essential component of every meal.
• Starch and sugar – we are talking weight loss – so these are things we have had in abundant supply already, and our body has stored them – we can dip into our stores quite a bit for quite some time, so we don’t really need much of the above!! (I dipped into my stores for a year and a half to get to my ideal weight!!)

If we look at the above, we can see that we need to prioritize portions to be rich in the things we need – proteins, good lipids, vitamins, fiber, and nutrients – and very poor in starch and sugars.

Implementing Portion Control in Your Daily Routine​

Portion-controlled meals are those that have been designed to have portion sizes that are sufficient to meet your needs. I find that using the right-sized bowl really helps with this, and using multiple bowls with different portions in them, makes the meal look satisfying and huge when it is actually right sized. I like to use soup bowls with a 17 oz/500ml volume.

Overcoming Overeating: A Personal Journey​

In terms of designing controlled portions that help us meet our objectives, it is important to create compact, nutrient-dense, energy-poor portions. I personally have a problem where I eat too fast – this means that I can accidentally eat more than I need to. To understand our urge to eat, there is a complex series of stimuli that our body uses to regulate food intake. When we have eaten enough, the body will send signals to tell us to stop eating – this is termed eating to satiation. In my case, because I eat too fast, these signals cannot be sent in time for me to have eaten a sensible amount, and the result is overeating which leads to weight gain.


This article provides a nice overview of how these systems work to regulate our food intake. In essence, portion-controlled meals help us hack problems with our own satiation system. I enjoy cooking and like to take a while to cook. I have noticed that, because I nibble and taste stuff as I cook, the effect of preparing food and cooking it, and tasting it, means that I have small little spoonfuls here and there while cooking and that by the time I dish up my compact, portion-controlled bowl of food, my body only requires a few more mouthfuls of food to trigger the satiated feeling, and I am therefore not tempted to go back for seconds.


In the early days of this voyage, I made sure that there were no second servings available and had an “ingredient house” where everything I had had to be cooked to be eaten. This increases the time it takes to be able to have a snack, and the result is far lower food intake. If I try to eat a portion-controlled diet, and then have a chunk of cheese in the fridge, I will go and eat it. Not having the cheese in the fridge helps avoid this problem. Chewing on a handful of lentils does not work. This limits quick snacks to a boiled egg or some other non-fattening snack.

The Role of Soup in a Portion-Controlled Diet​

Soup has an incredibly important role to play in portion-controlled diets. Soup, if made correctly, can contain a lot of water, and a lot of soluble nutrients, with low carbohydrate concentrations. Part of triggering satiation, and taking away the urge to eat, is to stretch the stomach a bit – filling your stomach with nutrient-dense soup, allows you to ingest vitamins, minerals, lipids, protein, and a little carbohydrate in a bioavailable form. The bonus is the consumption of significant water volumes. This stretches the stomach, triggering a feeling of fullness. This water will rapidly be absorbed, benefitting kidney function, and helping with hydration. Your stomach will consequently empty rapidly, and then it is easy to go about your day nourished and full of energy.

A Simple Meal for Effective Weight Loss​

The following simple portion-controlled meal will leave you feeling satiated, energized, and healthy:

What you will need:

Chili Soup by New Direction – 1 Sachet.

Two or three eggs, depending on how much protein you need, lettuce, basil, chives, olives, and sugar-free salad dressing (I use Blue Cheese style).

Spotlight on a Nutrient-Dense Meal: New Direction's Chili Soup​

I want to delve into this specific Chili Soup product because it is a very interesting product and is very healthy. Normal packet soups are quite dangerous things due to a variety of cheap, unhealthy ingredients. If you look at the New Direction Chili soup it contains, for example, Vitamin E (Tocopherols) as an antioxidant. This is actually a vitamin and is good for you – normal packet soup uses TBHQ which is probably not good for you. Vitamin E is expensive, but TBHQ is not – the formulators of this product did not cut corners on price and provide health which saves you money in the long term. If we look at the nice color, that is achieved by adding red sweet potato, chili, and red beetroot – these natural colorants are full of antioxidants and are actually good for you, unlike the synthetic red colors in mainstream foods. The remainder of the ingredients are formulated such that this product tastes great and is full of vitamins! It is like a multivitamin in a bowl of deliciousness. I will only sing the praises of something that makes sense to me, and this product really does. Well done to the food scientists who developed it.