Using pre-prepared meals you can control your portion sizes while still eating good quality food.

The art of portion control is in figuring out ways to make yourself eat only
the amount of food you intend to. For many of the same reasons we discussed
in the Use Meal Replacements strategy, you might find pre-prepared meals an
excellent strategy for enforcing portion control.

Pre-prepared meals are ready-to-eat or near-ready-to-eat, are quick and
easy to make and have a known calorie count for a known portion size. With
a little calculation and measuring, you can determine exactly how many
calories you are eating. That’s a big advantage over eating out or even fixing
your own meals.

Pre-prepared meals have another portion control advantage because they
are naturally limited in size. While you might go get another serving from your
casserole dish, it’s unlikely you’ll make another pre-packaged meal.
Companies are now targeting the busy family market with pre-prepared
meals, so you can expect to see even more products in the future.

One of the under-appreciated benefits of using pre-packaged foods is
they teach you what proper portion sizes look like. We have become so used
to large portion sizes we don’t know what a proper sized piece of chicken or
serving of pasta looks like anymore.

One way to teach yourself proper portion sizes is to use pre-prepared
meals like those supplied by NutriSystem, South Beach, Lean Cuisine, and
other vendors. You don’t even need to eat their food for weight loss reasons.
By eating their meals, you’ll begin to learn and get a feel for how much food
you should be eating. The small size of the portions will be quite shocking at
first. Once you get used to them it will be easier for you to eat the right portion
sizes in the future.

What are some of your pre-prepared meal options?

1. Healthy Frozen Dinners. Frozen dinners were horrible at one
time. That’s not as true anymore. Many good-quality, low-calorie
frozen dinners are available now.

2. Prepackaged Dinners. Look in the refrigerator section of your
store for complete prepackaged ready-to-cook meals for your family.
New products are coming on to the market all the time.

3. Fresh Preparation. This is a service combining the benefits of
meal preparation services and frozen dinners. They provide a
menu of meals you can choose from, do all the shopping, and
then perform some of the more time consuming meal preparation
steps. You cook the meals in their facilities and take the finished
masterpieces home with you to serve later. The advantage is that
you get a wide variety of fresh food with known portion sizes. You
also get to cook, which is a lot of fun, especially once you remove
all the labor of shopping and chopping from the process!

4. Personal Chef Service. Meal preparation services have become a
lot more popular lately. They can include personalized meal planning,
grocery shopping and preparation of dinners. They do all
the cooking for you. There is a wide variety of different options,
depending on your budget and preferences. You can pick up preprepared
meals each day, or you can take home a bunch of meals
for later. The advantage of using a meal preparation service compared
to frozen or prepackaged dinners is that the food should be
fresher, higher quality, more nutritious, and better tasting.

5. Full Time Personal Chef. If you have the resources, a personal
chef is a good hire. Your expert cook can make a wide variety of
the foods you like while keeping your calorie budget in mind.

6. Restaurant Pickup and Delivery. Most restaurants aren’t a good
source for meals because they generally serve large portions of
high calorie food. That’s why we like them, I know, but it’s not
good portion control. I would like to see restaurants creating
healthy, good tasting meals with known portion sizes and nutritional
information. To me this seems a natural market for restaurants.
They are often conveniently located and are already set up
to cook fresh good quality food. They just need to take that extra
step of helping people stay on their diet.

You can build an almost impenetrable Safe Zone around these ideas.
You don’t always have to make your own meals. You are minimizing your
chances of slipping-up by limiting your portion sizes using pre-packaged
meals. That’s how you put yourself in the best position to succeed at controlling
your weight.

You still have chances to cook if you want. You don’t need to eat every dinner
as a pre-prepared meal. You may want to cook on the weekends when you
have time and use pre-prepared meals on the weekdays when time is short.

Even when using pre-packaged meals, you may need to fix a salad or
other side dish, as most won’t provide enough calories on their own. To go
along with a frozen dinner, I usually fix a big salad, some fruit, and a dessert.
Sometimes I’ll even toss in a small appetizer. The salad helps fill me up and
provides excellent nutrition. My fruit of choice is either a crisp apple or sliced
strawberries spiked with cinnamon. For dessert I’ll toss in a couple of squares
of high quality chocolate.

Overall the meal is healthy, portion controlled, and there’s very little
opportunity for slipping-up. All fine attributes of a Safe Zone.