Pound of Feathers or Lead? Serving Sizes Matter

As some of you may know from my Twitter and Facebook Posts, my goal for the New Year is to get healthier and lose weight. I’ve always stuck to an exercise regimen, but found that losing weight was just not happening in the past couple of years.

One thing that I had not done, as I had in the past, was limit my carbs. That was step one and wow, what a difference. Cutting back and substituting whole grain carbs has made a HUGE difference. It’s been just two weeks and I’ve lost 11 pounds.

The other thing I’m doing is being more conscious of serving sizes. Let’s face it, it’s tough to know what is a cup of anything and the last thing I want to do is to turn cooking dinner into a chemistry lab where I am busily measuring everything.

But serving sizes do matter and with that in mind, I laid out a tablespoon on the kitchen counter and took my plastic measuring cups to my office, where most of my mot egregious eating happens at lunch hour with my friends. The goal: make sure that the size of my portions was in keeping with the serving size so that I would know just how many calories I was eating!

But measuring cups and spoons are not always available, so how do you know when it’s one serving or more?

I’ve tracked down this excellent visual comparison from the people at the Food Network! Just click here to see how you can gauge just how many servings are in your portion!

My hardest one to judge is always meats. Now I know that of beef/chicken/pork looks like a deck of cards or my palm without my fingers (another good way to gauge). So how many ounces is in a meat serving? 3 ounces. If you’re eating fish, three ounces looks like the size of a checkbook.

If you’re going to have a larger portion (8 ounces) of meat, a serving is about the size of a thin paperback novel.

I hope this helps out if like me, you’re trying to implement a healthier lifestyle for the New Year.

4 Replies to “Pound of Feathers or Lead? Serving Sizes Matter”

  1. Congratulations!! I’ve started slowly and lost a single pound but tomorrow is the actual start of my diet; I should be able to lose after that.

  2. The visual comparison from the Food Network is very helpful. It is so easy to overestimate serving sizes.

  3. I stop eating at 8pm. I started this last Feb. for lent. I have not done anything else and I lost 28 lbs in a year. Congrats on your weight loss.

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