Our food serving sizes have as much as tripled in the last 20 or so years, and our activity levels have plummeted to an all time low, so it’s no surprise then that our average body weights have increased.

Serving sizes haven’t increased just because we’re putting more on our plates at each meal - although this has certainly happened - there are two other places that the extra has crept in:

• The packet sizes of food have increased, and

• Many of the foods we consume everyday are much higher in calories (energy) than they were a couple of decades ago!

Let’s look at an example of the humble potato chip.

Once upon a time, only twenty or so years ago, when we bought a single packet of potato chips to munch on, the packets weighed around 30 grams, that was about 150 calories.

Now, single packets off the shelf are between 50 grams and 100 grams.

These bigger packets, which we still think of as a single serve, mean that we are eating an extra 100 to 300 calories in that one serve.

Add to this that a packet of chips used to be a treat, something we only had at parties and definitely not everyday, or even every week, where now they’ve become daily fare in many households, and we can see how quickly those extra calories add up.

The increase in packet sizes and the frequency with which we consume these foods makes it very easy, without even noticing, to put a lot more energy into our bodies, energy that we don’t need, and which the body converts to fat.

How You Can Easily Turn Twenty Grams Into 5 Kilograms!

Twenty grams of chips is equal to about 100 calories. If you eat 20 grams of chips each day for a year (and your body didn't need that energy) at the end of the year you have added 5 kilos to your body.

If you eat 350 calories a day that your body doesn’t need, and your body converts those 350 units of energy to fat, that’s over 15 kilograms of extra body weight a year!

Now for the good news for losing weight

On the positive side, small reductions in the serving sizes of the high energy foods we consume, can have big positive effects on our weight.

Just reducing our serving sizes by splitting a 50 gram bag of potato chips over 2 days, instead of every day, will instantly have us eating nearly 100 calories less every day. That’s 5 kilograms of weight we won’t add to our waistline.

We can, of course, exercise that pesky 100 off, but that will take us 30 minutes of jogging, how much easier if we just don’t put it on to start with!

Reducing our food serving sizes of high energy foods is one of the simplest places to focus on when losing weight, and can have huge positive results.