Your eyes want it, but does your stomach NEED it???

At the end of August 2010, as my 34th birthday loomed, I decided to upgrade my cellphone and, once I did, I discovered the joy of cellphone applications! I found one to track my walking through GPS, accurately tracking my distance and speed, and one to easily find nutritional information on most all of the chain restaurants. Most importantly, I found an app to use to track my calories consumed and my calories burned. This app opened my eyes almost as much as the movies Food, Inc and Super Size Me. (If you haven't seen these movies, I highly suggest that you check them out...WOW! You can rent them from Netflix or any other movies rental place.) I am definitely more of a logical and analytical person and sometimes I need to be able to see things in black and white to get the point. This app certainly helped with that. I had already started reading all of the nutritional labels on foods at the grocery store, before I decided which products to purchase. I had also been keeping up with my calories, as much as possible, in my head. I was losing weight, so I must have been doing a pretty good job, but the app made it all so much easier. While paying close attention to my portion size, I began HONESTLY (that is important) and more accurately accounting for all of the calories that I consumed in a day. When I measured or counted out a "portion" of a certain product, it was often shocking how small of an amount that "portion" actually was. The amount that I would have eaten before I started HONESTLY tracking my calories, would have been 3-4 times the size of one portion and I would have counted it as "one portion" when figuring out how many calories I had eaten. My eyes had been trained in today's society to believe that more is better and that "one portion" should almost fill the drastically oversized plates that are used in so many homes and restaurants. My eyes were WRONG! More is not better. In fact, when I began eating the correct portion sizes, I noticed that I wasn't feeling overly stuffed when I was done eating and I just generally felt better.