Hey, I'm so excited that you're here. This is actually where we bring in all the information that we've learned so far and we start to implement it into your lifestyle. I'm talking about a healthy plate. Now from the handout, you will see that healthy plate is a plate that is half vegetables yet I said 50% vegetables and or fruit. It is 25% some type of protein and 25% some type of healthy grain or healthy starch like sweet potatoes, for example. So that is what our plates should look like.

And that is very, very simple way of thinking about a healthy plate. It's a very visual way of looking at it. And I actually have on the handout specific examples of how many ounces or how many cups of the fruits and vegetables proteins and the starches that you actually would want to put on your plate. The most important thing you want to think about is breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack, your plate should still look the same. The other thing I want to mention to you is that vegetables are one of the best things to help us balance our blood sugars. So on that 50% of fruits and vegetables, you really want to spend much of that plate on vegetables, and then maybe once or twice a day, you can add a fruit to that, which will also help you bounce your blood sugars.

Now you already know that fruits can be a very healthy part of someone who's working with blood sugars, pre diabetic or diabetic. You just have to make sure you don't do it too often, but that you do include that because that's part of our colors of the rainbow that we need to eat on a daily basis. The other tips that are related to a healthy plate portion size says it's really important, and you may not think that it is. But I'll give you an example. portion sizes can have a lot to do with your blood sugar's going up higher than you want them to go. Very often when I'm working with patients that are interested in weight loss, as well as blood sugar balancing, or sometimes they're just interested in weight loss, they come into the office and I give them those portion sizes that you'll see in your handout.

And they actually realize they've been eating two to three times the amount of the foods that I have recommended for them. And as a result, their blood sugar's actually start to stabilize when they eat appropriate portion sizes. If they're coming in for weight loss, what they notice is they lose weight, and they actually don't feel hungry even though they're eating smaller portion sizes. Now why is this the case? Most often, people are over feeding themselves. And the mechanism to actually tell us whether we're hungry or not, does not kick in for at least 20 minutes.

So when you eat a plate of food, and you start with the salad plate, which is what I always recommend you eat with a salad plate, you eat that you wait 20 minutes from the first time you eat, to when you're going to make a decision of whether you're going to get seconds. Oftentimes, by that time, the signals from our stomach have gone to our brain to let us know that we are actually satisfied and satiated. When you eat a bigger plate or you eat multiple portion sizes on a plate. You're so busy eating that you don't give your body time to give you the signal that you're full. And by the time you do get the signal you're actually feeling stuff. I can tell you from personal experience, I spent the first 20 something years of my life feeling stuck.

Instead of feeling satiated and feeling full, so that's a very important tip for weight loss, but it's also an important tip for blood sugar balance. So if you're a person that needs to do both, just try that tip it will make a difference for you eating on a salad plate. The other thing that is also helped my patients quite a bit