A new kind of diet program that allows you to

A new kind of diet program that allows you to eat the foods you love: it's all about food portion sizes!

With the holiday season fast approaching, we're all looking forward to those holiday meals, decked with more than the usual portions of calories. With all these goodies, it takes a person with discipline to burn, to avoid overindulging during the holiday season offerings. Of course, we all know this means putting on some extra weight. Here we've got a strategy that allows you to partake of virtually all of the delicious treats of the season, while gaining perhaps just a pound or two by the time New Year's rolls around.

So what's this miracle of a strategy? It's simple. Beginning around Halloween, or sooner, you embark on a food training program, which is not a diet, but retraining in your food portion sizes. In addition, you make some modifications to your eating patterns. Instead of the usual three meals a day, split your meals in to five or six smaller meals each day.

Everyone's had the experience of sitting down to a big Thanksgiving feast, your plate piled high and heavy with the bird, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and muffins. Everything seems irresistible. By the end of the meal, you can barely move. Oh, but it was so delicious!

What happens to your stomach? In order to accommodate every last bite, your stomach actually stretches out to become a larger organ than it was! Therein lies the rub.

On the other hand, if you were to assume your eyes are indeed, bigger than your stomach and cut your food portion sizes in half, for each and every dish on your plate, eat slowly and chew your food well, your stomach gets clues as to how comfortably full it is. Using smaller food portions in this way, it's almost a certainty that you'll feel full before you've finished off the plate. Yet you'll have had the satisfaction of tasting everything!

If you begin using this strategy well ahead of the holiday festivities and temptations, your stomach will actually start to shrink to a normal size. For example, if your usual pre-holiday menu consists of meatloaf and gravy, roasted potatoes and salad with a side of bread, reducing your food portion sizes gradually by, say, just of what you'd normally eat, your stomach becomes accustomed to feeling full with the reduced amount of food. Eating slowly and drinking a glass of cold water with your meals, enhances this effect. After just a week or so of retraining your stomach's expectations, you'll feel satisfied with the amount of reduced food portions you consume at each meal.

Here's another trick, well known to diabetics: Consuming three large meals a day puts a load on your body, with a rush of nutrients and sugars coming into your bloodstream all at once, making it more difficult for your body to absorb and process. Let's use the meatloaf meal example above to see how you can further refine your food portion size strategy, to the betterment of your health and getting your stomach and digestive system working more efficiently. Dive this meal into two. Have the salad and bread as a late-afternoon 'appetizer' to your main meal. Eating this mini-meal, just an hour before dinner, primes your stomach and digestive system with high fiber, low-sugar foods, but doesn't overwhelm your system all at once, while producing that desirable feeling of fullness. With a glass of water consumed with the salad and bread, just half of your usual meatloaf, gravy and potato food portion sizes may be all you'll want an hour later.

You can use the same strategy with breakfast and lunch. For breakfast, an 8-ounce fruit smoothie is a filling and nutritious start to the day. Follow up with a bran muffin and a piece of fruit around 10:00am. This should keep you going until 1:00. A small, say, 4-ounce portion of lean meat and a cup of potato or macaroni salad should be all you need 'til 4 or 5pm, when it's time for your dinner appetizer of salad and bread.

It's easy to see how the food portion size strategy can reduce your overall food and calorie consumption, within a relatively short time frame. Come holiday and party time, you can happily enjoy those goodies in lesser amounts, without feeling deprived and gaining very little weight during the celebratory season. Learning to tame those food portion sizes is one of the easiest diet plans around. Sounds like a plan!