Tag Archives: serving size

Most Americans Clean Their Plates. Most Americans are Obese. There is a Connection.

The encouragement to eat everything on your dinner (or breakfast or lunch) plate comes in many forms. “Don’t be wasteful.” “Make a happy plate!” “Finish your food or you’ll get no dessert.” Or, my personal least favorite, “There’s starving children in _____ that would love to have that food.”

No matter how you phrase it, most of us are taught from a young age to eat everything that is placed before us.

eating from plate

While wasting food is never a good idea, there are plenty of ways to prevent waste that don’t include stuffing ourselves with every last morsel of food.

However, if you’re part of the clean-your-plate crew, you’re not alone. The average adult eats 92 percent of the food on their plate, Shape Magazine reports, no matter what that food may be.

Eating everything on your plate, healthy or no, could be causing you to overeat without you noticing. In turn, that could cause unwanted weight gain.

The Morning-After Pill for Your Food Baby is Available OTC

Happily, there are some simple steps you can take to “reprogram” yourself out of the need to eat everything placed in front of you. (more…)

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Elizabeth

Servings Size Scams Don’t Effect the Well Informed

I get a lot of emails from people that know I’m a health writer that stumble upon interesting articles. They shoot me the link, usually with a subject line of “Can you believe this!?” Today I logged in to find an article sent to me called “Serving Size Scams Can Make You Fat” from MSNBC.com. Excited to share with you all which foods are “marketed as lower in calories than they really are,” I opened the link.

Fail. This is what I found:

Serving Size Rip-Off: Campbell’s Chunky Microwaveable Soup
Listed calories: 200
Servings per container: 2
Total calories: 400

They then go on to claim it is ludicrous that one single microwavable cup is 2 servings because people will only eat it all in one sitting.

They list Pop Tarts (who only eats just one?) packages of ramen noodles, pot pies and more processed foods that anyone interested in eating healthy wouldn’t touch anyway as shady labeling offenders…because they have more than one serving per package.

Wait, wait, wait. So because most people will devour the food in one sitting, companies should change their serving sizes to one entire package? Valid point if you want to make it, but to say they are “scamming” people is making excuses for those who aren’t informed on how to properly read a nutrition label. All the information on the package is correct and legal- it is not the company’s fault you don’t know how to interpret it.

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Posted on March 7, 2024 by Kelly

Eating Healthy is About More Than Just Calories

Anda T. writes about her weight loss struggles, victories and every day life at www.leavingfatville.com. She also runs www.greatclothingexchange.com in her spare time when not chasing a toddler, cooking, cleaning, working and trying to take over the world.

I had no idea how little I knew about nutrition until I started to count calories. Sure, I had a general concept that 2000 calories was acceptable for a day of food. But, really getting down to the nitty gritty, I had no idea how much of each type of food I should have been eating.

I saw no problem with eating a salad. And I’m sure you won’t either, if you’re thinking of just a small green salad. That was not my salad. My salad was iceberg lettuce (no nutritive value whatsoever), cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers (a few good things), sunflower seeds and gobs and gobs of ranch dressing. That was healthy to me. That was my effort of eating light.

That was not eating light. That was eating a 500 calorie salad with little or no protein, vitamins, or good, healthy fats to show for it. It wasn’t until I started to track my food did I start to see the calories add up, and the weight go right along with it. I had no idea what were healthy fats and what were bad fats. (Luckily, I had stayed away from trans fats as a byproduct of a lack of a gallbladder, but I still couldn’t point one out if you asked me.)

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Posted on August 23, 2023 by GuestBlogger

5 Rules of Following Serving Sizes

By Delia Quigley for Care2.com

Want to lose weight, keep weight in check, eat just enough to nourish and strengthen your body? Then keeping your meals to the proper serving size is the way to go. But, if serving sizes are important why have meal portions gotten so much larger? One reason is that restaurants and food manufacturers have used “size” as an incentive to lure customers to buy their products and people have responded with a bit too much enthusiasm. More is always better in our culture and that is never truer than with portions of food. Portion size is not to be confused with the recommended serving size of a particular food group. The American meal portions have grown in proportion to our waistlines, but the recommended serving sizes have remained unchanged. (more…)

Posted on July 15, 2023 by GuestBlogger

Americans Have Overly Optimistic View of Their Nutritional Wellbeing HealthiNation Study Reveals

To coincide with the American Dietetic Association’s National Nutrition Month, HealthiNation commissioned a study by ORC International: CARAVAN revealing that Americans have an overly optimistic view of their own nutritional wellbeing.  The findings of the national phone survey of 1,000 U.S. adults suggest that when it comes to nutrition, Americans’ perceptions do not match reality.

A majority of adults (52%) think that they are doing all they can do to achieve a balanced nutritional diet and almost two-thirds of adults (63%) believe they have a solid understanding of the basics of nutrition.  Yet, 76% of adults are not getting the minimum daily serving of fruits and vegetables as recommended by the USDA. On average, adults eat fewer than three servings (defined as ½ cup portions) of fruits and vegetables a day combined. Why the discrepancy and how can we educate without information overload?

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Posted on March 15, 2024 by Maris

Top 10 Ways To Prevent Overeating

man hamburgerOvereating has become a huge problem these days and I know we are all guilty of it every now and then. The majority of Americans eat due to boredom or depression. By keeping ourselves busy, active, and out of stressful/depressing situations, we can beat this phenomenon.

Overeating not only causes rapid weight gain, but high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, or even a ruptured stomach can be result. Serving sizes have been blow out of proportion these days and can actually be rather scary. Below are the recommended serving sizes as well as a few helpful tips to prevent overeating. (more…)

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Matt

TwoFoods: Your Diet’s New Best Friend

How come someone hasn’t thought of this diet tool before? TwoFoods is a free website application that allows you to compare two foods at once to determine which one better fits into your eating plan.

twofoods

For instance, you can compare a McDonald’s grilled chicken salad to Panera’s grilled chicken Caesar salad, to find that the McDonald’s version is a better choice; or you can compare generic potato chips against Baked Lays and receive a complete nutritional analysis of calories, fat, carbs and protein grams. (more…)

Posted on September 6, 2023 by heather

Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest Yields Frightening Nutrition Facts

joey chestnut nathans famous hot dog eating contestClearly no one signs up for an eating contest of any kind with the goal of minding their portion sizes. For participants in the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual 4th of July event, the more you eat the better. Each year two men continually beat the rest of the contestants and battle it out for the infamous hot dog title.

We all know that whatever is in a hot dog is questionable, but do you think Joey Chestnut, of the U.S., and Takeu Kobayashi, of Japan, have ever stopped to read the food label on their pile of hot dogs? We think not. The folks at CalorieLab did the math and calculated exactly what the nutritional aftermath looks like when you eat 66 hot dogs on 66 buns (the total consumed by Chestnut in the 2024 event). (more…)

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Natalie K

Serving Size is Not Just a Suggestion

nutrition facts labelOne of the biggest keys to weight loss success is facing the reality of an accurate serving size.  Let’s take this morning’s breakfast of cereal as a prime example, shall we?  If you are anything like me, I stumble into the kitchen, blearily grab a box of cereal and a bowl, and dump the cereal into the bowl.  I fill it most of the way full, and then add milk.  I sit down and eat, not paying much attention until I get to the bottom of the bowl.  Zzzzzz…

What’s the problem in this scenario?  (Other than the fact that I’m eating while just about asleep, that is…) The almost certain culprit would be the way that I poured the cereal.  Free form, loose and flowing are great things for art work, but they really play havoc on your diet.  Flip that cereal box around, see where it say SERVING SIZE?  Yeah, those words are actually there for a reason, not just as pretty filler for white space. (more…)

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Carmen