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This is part two of several posts reviewing Lisa R. Young’s, The Portion Teller: Smartsize Your Way to Permanent Weight Loss. Part one explained how to “smartsize” your meals.
One of the most practical points that I’ve taken from this book so far is this: Americans eat too much of everything. There isn’t one food group responsible for our expanding waistlines. In order to avoid cravings and lose weight, we need to cut food from all of the food groups instead of cutting out entire groups. This book provides a simple plan to help us eat the right foods in the right amounts. The basis of the plan is the Portion Teller Food Pyramid as seen below:
What I like about this pyramid is that it doesn’t eliminate any foods whatsoever. There’s even a place in a balanced diet for things like dessert–however, moderation is key. But how do we know what a serving is? We’ve already been introduced to what a portion is (whatever you put on your plate) but if we’re over weight, then we’re putting too many servings into our portions. Throughout this chapter, Dr. Young provides us with concrete, visual aids to help us in determining the right serving size for all of the different food groups in her pyramid. Let’s take a look at each of the groups in the pyramid and get an idea of what a single serving from that group would be:
Fruit (2-4 servings daily):
We all know that fruits contain loads of vitamins and minerals, but they also contain a lot of sugar which is why we’re told to limit our fruit intake to 2-4 servings per day. Dr. Young tells us that the most helpful visual for determining the right serving size of fruit is a baseball. A baseball’s volume is approximately 1 cup. So 1 cup of berries and 1 baseball sized apple or orange would be good examples of a fruit serving. According to The Portion Teller, the best fruits, nutritionally, are berries, kiwi, melons and citrus, and we should avoid fruit juice, dried fruits, canned fruits in syrup due to their high sugar content.
Non-Starchy Vegetables (3+ servings daily)
Yippee! We can eat as many servings of vegetables as we want! Again, the visual of choice is the baseball. A serving size of raw vegetables is 1 cup, while a serving size of cooked vegetables is 1/2 cup. The best way to maximize your vegetable nutrient intake is to eat as colorful a plate as possible. Some of the most nutrient packed vegetables include spinach, red peppers, asparagus, broccoli and carrots. There’s no need to avoid any of the non-starchy vegetables because according to Dr. Young, “No one ever got fat from eating too many carrots.”
Grains and Starchy Vegetables (4-8 servings daily )
The Portion Teller Pyramid allows us to eat more servings of grains and starchy vegetables than any other food group. But it also provides us with a warning for the types of grains we’re supposed to eat. It tells us to choose healthy grains such as whole wheat, rye, and oats while avoiding white bread, muffins, bagels, and pasta. However, the most important thing to consider when eating our grain servings is the correct serving size. Remember, “white flour products, such as bagels and muffins, have increased in size over the past few decades, sometimes as much as 400%.” A computer mouse is the right size for a baked potato, a CD is the right size for a pancake or a pita bread. And a CD case is the correct size for a piece of bread. Be careful with your grains, the average American eats 17 Portion Teller sized servings of grains every day.
Fish, Poultry, and Meat (2-3 servings daily)
6-8 ounces of meat will provide us with all of the protein we need each day. Dr. Young recommends one serving of meat with every meal and she stresses that low fat, high protein meats such as poultry, fish, and the leaner cuts of red meat are the ones we should be eating. You may also want to include eggs and legumes into your balanced diet as these contain different types of fats that might not be found in the other types of protein. The visuals provided to help us size up our meat servings depend on the type of meat being eaten. More often than not, a deck of cards will be similar to a serving of meat. However, if you’re protein source is a flaky white fish, a standard check book is a good visual that approximates 3 ounces.
Dairy (2-3 servings daily)
There are many benefits to including several servings of low-fat dairy into your diet on a daily basis. Dairy products are wonderful sources of calcium and the B vitamin Riboflavin; some sources are even fortified with Vitamin D. Another huge benefit of consuming dairy products is that the protein in them fills you up so you don’t feel hungry. I like dairy products a lot and find it hard to keep within the recommended 2-3 servings per day for dairy–I guess there are worse things that I could be cheating with. Dr. Young provides several visuals to help find the right serving size when it comes to dairy products. My favorite one is the “4 dice visual.” Whenever I go to a party, often the thing that trips me up is the cheese tray–certainly one more of those little cubes couldn’t hurt? But how many have I already had? My new trick is to use a plate. Every five cubes basically equals about one ounce, or one serving of dairy. I put all my “dice” on my plate at the beginning and don’t go back to the buffet. I don’t have to limit myself to just one serving, but I make sure to budget those extra cubes in to my day.
Fat (1-3 servings daily)
1 to 3 servings of fat daily is not very much fat. The Portion Teller provides simple visuals for doling out your fats as well. A golf ball is about 1 oz, a shot glass is about 2 tablespoons and a walnut is about 2 tablespoons. The fat visuals are by far the smallest of the visuals provided in the book because gram for gram, fat has about 3 times as many calories as carbohydrate and protein. It’s recommended to steer clear of the “bad fats” such as butter, coconut oil, cream cheese and mayonnaise so that you can concentrate on consuming good fats such as olive oil, tahini, avocado, nuts, and nut butters.
Treats and Sweets (0-2 servings daily)
Everyone agrees that treats and sweets aren’t good for us. But they are part of life–I’d never give them up completely. Like fats, treats also have very small visuals to help you relate to serving size because they are calorie dense foods. You’re supposed to think in terms of 1/2 of a baseball or 1 tennis ball. The Portion Teller also gives us some tips to help us deal with the sweet tooth in all of us:
- Avoid your triggers–if you can’t stop with one serving of chips, then don’t eat any.
- Only splurge 1 day a week–avoid eating sweets on a daily basis and they’ll seem like more of a treat.
- Skip soft drinks–you’re better off chewing your calories than drinking them.
- Fat free still means calorie laden–be careful when eating those low fat cakes, cookies, and ice creams.
- Share–order one dessert for two people when at a restaurant.
These two chapters in The Portion Teller weren’t as riveting to me as the first couple simply because of how shocking the first ones were. However, they were much more helpful to me. I haven’t memorized all of the visuals given in the book, nor have I mentioned them all. But just by thinking about them, I’ve gained an awareness of how many servings used to be in my portions. When I’m cooking now, I have a much clearer idea of how much food I’m supposed to be eating at any given time.
All the images from this post were taken directly from The Portion Teller and used without permission. Dr. Young encourages the photocopying of the materials in the book for use in helping us get control of our serving sizes.
J.D.
18 responses so far ↓
1 Stefan // Feb 15, 2008 at 7:29 am
Hey Mac,
thanks for the info :-).
I found a site a couple of month ago which is showing the amount of food you can eat for 200 calories. It doesn’t emphasize the importance of balance and nutritious value besides calories, but it’s still fun to see how many hershey kisses you could eat for 200 calories (36 grams or about 8 pieces) in comparison to celery (1456 grams).
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm
Greetings
Stefan
2 Amy // Feb 15, 2008 at 8:18 am
probably the most helpful and useful post on food I’ve read in a while!
3 Lazy Man and Health // Feb 15, 2008 at 8:48 am
The 17 grain portions are a big problem for most people. I would include myself even though I’m probably closer to 11 or 12 portions.
I have to be nitpicky here though… she says that it’s the size of a baseball and then has the illustration say a tennis ball? They might be the same size, but one would think they’d stick with one sport or the other :-).
4 macdaddy // Feb 15, 2008 at 8:57 am
5 elisabeth // Feb 15, 2008 at 9:56 am
I suppose the tennis ball/baseball analogy is also a subtle hint to get exercising, but really, neither of these are integral parts of my life — we don’t even have one in the house! In some cases, a kitchen scale might be useful (after all, a fish portion has both depth as well as area, so two pieces both the size of a checkbook could be very different in weight/calories).
we went out to dinner last night for valentine’s day and shared our dessert(s) instead of sharing one dessert — but we don’t eat out often and, since we ate vegan, I suspect that overall we were getting more vegetables and whole grains and fewer bad fats than we would have elsewhere.
6 jesse // Feb 15, 2008 at 10:05 am
I think that’s pretty interesting and pretty much what Weight Watchers says, overall. I’m just wondering where the legumes are on this chart! I don’t do meat or dairy so it seems kind of skewed. It looks like the newer FDA pyramid includes legumes with meats.
http://www.mypyramid.gov/
7 macdaddy // Feb 15, 2008 at 10:57 am
8 greenman2001 // Feb 15, 2008 at 11:05 am
My head is about to fall off.
If this helps guide people in their eating, great, but I find this kind of thing to be extraordinarily confusing, contradictory, and motivation-sapping.
Today I’ve eaten two eggs fried in butter, about 4 oz. of white baguette, a large latte, an apple, a handful of cashews, and an overstuffed portabello-spinach sandwich with lots of tomato and cucumber in a spinach wrap with some kind of delicious dressing. Can anyone tell me how many “portions” I’ve eaten? I can tell you that I’ve eaten about 900 calories so far today, because I took the time months ago to figure out how many calories are in everything I’ve eaten (about 350 in the wrap — which I eat for lunch 2-3 times a week, half of which are in the tablespoon or so of oil in the dressing). I reverse-engineered the wrap to figure this out months ago, using my calorie counting book, as I do for many recipes.
My opinion is that if you’re going to count anything, count calories in order to develop the skill of pacing your calorie intake throughout the day. My suspicion is that if you eat the total number of portions given here, you’ll eat far too many calories to lose or maintain your weight.
One of the strategies of the diet culture is to make simple things complicated. No one wants to pay for simple techniques. The diet techniques of people who effectively lose 150-200 lbs can be described in about 3 paragraphs — one about diet, one about exercise, and one about a guiding set of ideas that ground your approach.
There: that’s somewhere between one and two portions of opinion.
9 A // Feb 15, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I hear you greenman - it’s SO much more complicated to check and see if your fish is similar in surface area to a playing card than is it to literally REVERSE ENIGINEER your food in order to count the calories.
Wait, that doesn’t sound right at all.
In all honesty, this is the most useful post I’ve seen here and echoes what I found when I started keeping rough track of how much I ate in a sitting. Not knowing even roughly how much a serving size is led me to thinking a 12oz cut of meat was pretty standard, and it lead to most of my over eating issues.
10 another leanne // Feb 15, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I tend to agree with greenman — that if you actually ate the requisite number of portions outlined in *any* food pyramid, you could wind up eating way more than you actually need, depending on your physical size (height, frame) and weight-loss goals. HOWEVER, I do think the “visual cues” are helpful, especially when eating out or at a party.
In general, these pyramids strike me as most instructive for figuring out how much of your diet, proportionally, should consist of each of the various categories. Even if you ratchet down the overall caloric intake, you’re going to feel less hungry if you spread that smaller calorie allotment over 14+ to 24+ portions, a good 7-15 of which consist of whole grains and bulky fruits and veggies.
11 Joshua // Feb 15, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Thanks for the visual cues. Being a visual learner this is much easier to remember than 2oz, 1 cup, etc.
“gram for gram, fat has about 3 times as many calories as carbohydrate and protein.”
I may be mistaken, but I thought to figure fat calories you multiply by 7 and for protein and carbs you multiply by 4.
12 greenman2001 // Feb 16, 2008 at 7:54 am
A, Sure, but how many portions is my portabello mushroom wrap? It crosses three categories and visually is the size of a shoe. If you’re serious about controlling the number of calories you consume, at a certain point you’ve got to figure out how many calories something like this has got in it. At this stage of the game, I know that half of one of these things is a 350 calorie meal — but I know it because I’m as full after eating half of one over the course of half an hour as I am every time I eat a 350 calorie meal. I don’t need to reverse engineer much of anything anymore: my body’s calorie-counting calculator (also known as my “appetite”) tells me. If I pay attention to the point at which I feel full I pretty much know how many calories I consume. When I ignore it and keep eating I quickly go over that threshold. I don’t see how this pyramid keeps that from happening. This seems to be a tool for telling me proportionally how much of each “food group” to eat.
13 Anne Keckler, Personal Trainer // Feb 16, 2008 at 11:29 am
Joshua, fat contains about 9 calories per gram, which is still only about twice as much as the 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein.
Alcohol is counted as 7 calories per gram.
14 Dana // Feb 18, 2008 at 3:14 am
What is this “eliminate an entire food group” stuff? Is this a reference to low-carbing? Because if it is, it’s… How do I put this? It’s not representative of the facts. There. That’s about as neutral as I can make it. Every-gosh-dern-body I run into who writes about low-carbing but has not actually done it themselves says that it requires taking all the carbs out of your diet. I could count on maybe two fingers the number of actual LCers I’ve run into online who’ve done that for any time at all. They’re considered weird by *other* LCers.
But what would you say to someone who is gluten intolerant? Who has a nut allergy? So on and so forth? If we “need” these foods to have a “balanced” diet then how come some folks CAN eliminate an entire food group, out of necessity, yet still get good nutrition?
If I were to eliminate grains from my diet–probably couldn’t pull it off, but let’s just say I did–what would I be missing? Fiber? Nope, I get that from fruits and veggies. B vitamins? Nope, I get those from meat. Minerals? Man, I get those from everything! Why in the world are we eating grain, then? Oh yeah, it stores well. Oh, well, is that all?
People think of food as a source of energy. It’s also a source of *nutrition.* That’s the whole point of setting up any kind of food group system, but one of the things we need to realize is that “balancing” a diet means getting all your essential nutrients *and nothing else.* It doesn’t mean 4 servings from this group and 3 from this other group and 2 from that one. It means, did you get all your necessary nutrition today? If you don’t know the answer to that question, the food groups aren’t going to help you; there can be as much variation in nutrition between two foods in the same group as there is between two foods from two different groups!
And don’t get me started about calorie theory… Man. Manohman.
Heh. Sorry about that. I will step off my soapbox now.
15 Dana // Feb 18, 2008 at 3:16 am
Ooh, ooh, I forgot to add. Even if I took all the grain out of my diet, guess what? I’d still be eating carbs. Yeppers. In milk, and cheese, and (if I ate them) organ meats, and fruits and veggies. People do this mental shorthand of “grains = carbohydrates” and “carbohydrates = grains” and completely do not look at other food sources of carbs–all of which, I might add, are significantly healthier in terms of vitamin, mineral, and *allergen* levels. Go figure.
I mean, I still *eat* them, but it’s kinda hard not to, in this culture.
16 Dana // Feb 18, 2008 at 3:21 am
OMG, sorry. One more post. Greenman: Have you ever TRIED counting calories every day with every single thing you eat? I have, and let me tell you, it is no way to live.
I’ve done the carb-counting thing, and that is no picnic either.
The clincher is that the count isn’t accurate anyway. Those numbers the USDA and FitDay and SparkPeople spit out at you when you tell them how much of something you had for breakfast, those are just averages. Your particular serving of food is going to vary by quite a bit because of growing conditions and that kind of thing. You may think it’s no big deal but if there is anything to standard calorie theory, just being off by 100 calories or so per meal is going to make a difference in your weight. Fun, huh?
Not that I think much of calorie theory, considering that the glucose-insulin connection is at least as important in weight gain in some people (like me), if not more so, and considering that your body doesn’t use all calories in the same way, nor does it use all the food it intakes for fuel. I mean, how in the world are you burning up all the fat and protein you eat if you need some of each to rebuild various structures and chemicals in the body? There’s a big difference between (1) cooking up a hormone, (2) building up a muscle, and (3) fueling a cell. Huge.
17 Joshua // Feb 18, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Actually, I think it is great to have visuals for portion sizes, but to use it in conjuntion with keeping a daily food log. I count calories and though I know it won’t be perfect, its alot better than, “oh, that banana probably had 60 calories(actually 112), and those frosted mini wheats, I had 1 bowl so thats probably a cup, so what, 150 calories(actually 1 1/2 cups and 285 calories). I am amazed at how much better I eat now that I keep a log, and I usually come up short of my 2200 daily calories anywhere from 300 to 700 calories, and no hunger.
18 greenman2001 // Feb 18, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Dana,
I counted calories for 20 weeks. Every calorie in, every calorie out. I lost 20 lbs, as planned, then stopped counting and have maintained that weight, more or less since then for almost two years. Yup, it was a pain the ass sometimes, but it was an essential exercise that enabled me how to relearn how to eat in a healthy way. The issues you raise about the inaccuracies and complications are perfectly true and absolutely irrelevant: maintain a calorie deficit and you lose weight. If you’re not losing weight, you’re not maintaining a calorie deficit. Eating to maintain fitness is a different endeavor, somewhat more complicated but not significantly so.
You’re absolutely right about the ridiculous-ness of no-carb and low-carb diets. When people use these terms in conversation, they really mean “no bread,” not “low carb.” In my opinion, the only people who should be reducing carbohydrate intake are those who are in danger of developing Type II diabetes.
Are you trying to lose weight? How are you accomplishing it?
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