When it comes to weight loss and eating healthy, many people are more successful when they eat “in moderation” rather than having an “all or nothing” mentality, which may entail a strict diet or plan that cuts out tons of foods. Eating in moderation includes all foods without feeling guilty or shameful. If you absolutely love your mom’s desserts, you can have them — but also include healthy and nutritious foods in your day. Here are our top four tips for eating in moderation. 

1. Master Mindfulness

Slowing down your eating experience — whether you’re at home or out at a fancy restaurant — can help you eat slower and more mindfully, which will likely lead to you eating in moderation. Often, we consume more than our bodies need simply because we are eating too fast, and our fullness or satiety hormones haven’t had time to tell our brain we’ve had enough. Savor your meal using all of your senses and see if you end up eating just the right amount. 

2. Boost the Nutrition of Your Faves

While we don’t want to feel guilty about eating our favorites — like that pie at mom’s house — we can certainly increase the nutritional status of many of our most-loved foods. This may include adding roasted vegetables to mac-and-cheese or including fiber-rich oats in your next batch of cookies. This way, you keep all of your favorite foods while ensuring your body gets the nutrition it needs.

3. Practice Proper Portions

Like eating mindfully, we often overeat because the portions we are served are simply too large, especially at restaurants or takeout. When you’re ordering something out — like a scoop of ice cream or French fries — a “kid’s” portion often has the correct size. Another way to practice eating in moderation is getting smaller, single-serve portions of your favorite treat, like mini candy bars. 

4. Give Yourself Grace

If you end up overeating something, or if your day dipped a little too far into eating pies than produce, give yourself grace instead of shaming yourself. To succeed in eating in moderation — which borrows many principles from eating intuitively — you need to remove the labels of “good” and “bad” from food. Instead, think of foods as “more nutritionally dense” or “less nutritionally dense.” Nothing is off-limits — even the less nutritionally dense foods can still bring other benefits, like joy and pleasure.