The small portions diet, sometimes called the baby food diet, is a new interesting way to lose weight. The idea is you eat small portions of food many times a day instead of the usual big meals 2 - 3 times a day that we typically do in America. The goal being to eat fewer calories by getting the body to become accustom to eating less in general.
The good news is this diet actually works.
The "baby food diet" is a bit more flexible than most popular diets, because you are free to appropriate the special food you eat as you see fit. It's not hard to fit this type of diet into your lifestyle. And that's always a key if you want to "stick it out" until you lose weight.
Here are some ways to integrate this diet to your daily routine:
1. The "extreme" approach is to completely replace all of your meals with baby food. With this method, you are to eat a jar, or serving, of baby food 14 times a day. So, if you are up 14 hours a day, you will have to eat one jar of baby food every hour from morning until bedtime.
2. If you follow a sensible diet most of the time, and you just need to slash a few hundred calories to lose a few pounds, you can just replace snacks with jars of baby food. All other meals remain the same.
3. If you have a generally high-calorie diet, you can replace one or more big meals with jars of baby food. So, if you tend to overeat in the evening, you may want to have a regular breakfast and lunch, but opt for baby food in the evening.
Of course, the choice as to which meal to replace with baby food is be entirely up to you. In the end, dieting is really just simple math - how many calories are you consuming on a daily basis?
If you are consuming more calories than usual, you will end up either maintaining your weight, or gaining weight.
If you slash the calories, you will lose weight over the long term, as your body must reduce your body mass to survive to consuming fewer calories. Unless you are retaining lots of water weight, caloric reduction is usually enough to decrease a person's weight by a few pounds.
There are no strict guidelines when it comes to the small portion diet. Unlike other diets, such as the Atkins Diet, or the South Beach Diet, you won't be doing a lot of measurements, but I still encourage you to measure what goes into your regular meals, and what goes into your baby food mini-meals, just to make sure that you are not exceeding your allotted caloric intake for the day.
If you have a tendency to overeat when you are dieting, measuring food is even more vital to your success. If you don't measure, it's easy to commit the common mistake of imagining that a serving is "small" -- even if it isn't.
If you are not an expert in visually measuring portions and servings, a kitchen scale and a set of measuring cups will make your life much easier.
And again, over time you will be able to develop a heightened skill in visually measuring portions, and you won't have to rely on your kitchen scale any longer, but, until that time comes, use your measuring tools.
If you want, you can also invest in a small digital kitchen scale. I find this nifty device extremely useful when I'm cooking. Now, if you don't want to measure baby food at all, you can just buy commercial baby food. But that should be a last resort, as I highly recommend that you make your own baby food at home.
The Theory Behind the Baby Food Diet
The Theory Behind the Baby Food Diet
There is nothing revolutionary, or groundbreaking, about the small portion diet; in fact, if you look for references online you won't find any big celebrities endorsing anything called the baby food diet. You won't find any bigwig scientific minds featuring the benefits of the diet, either.
But what makes the diet special is the soundness of the theory behind it. The theory is quite simple: if you control your calories, you will lose weight no matter what. Let me clarify early on that there is nothing special about eating small portions.
And there are no known components in baby food that speed up your metabolism, nor are there any hidden ingredients that cause the body to burn more fat and sugar.
The diet will cause weight loss because the dieter will eat fewer calories per day, without feeling starved for food. You won't feel starved for food, though, because if you use the small portion diet full time, you will be eating a meal every 1-2 hours.
The baby food diet might sound a little extreme for folks who are use to eating 3 meals per day in the usual way, but this diet can work for you, since you will be able to directly control the amount of calories you will be consuming in a day. Plus you won't be tempted to eat snacks because you won't be hungry.