Portion Control:
Learning to Eat Like a Bird and Be Happy About It
By Carol Daelemans

Now that I'm starting on Weight Watchers I'm also learning the mysteries of "Portion Control." This is not your father's portion. By the current Diet God's standards dinner should be no larger than your Poker hand. Would you recognize this meal from your childhood? Your mother would be ashamed to send you to school with that little food, much less call it dinner.

I'm a card carrying member of The Clean Plate Club. This has been ingrained into me. I can no more leave this philosophy behind than I can learn to fly. Card carrying members are reared to eat hearty (read: big) lunches followed by the biggest meal of the day—dinner.

Today the government is getting involved in the science of portion sizes. The labels on packaged foods are geared to give us accurate and more importantly, comparable information. Unfortunately this is not always working out. For instance, take a box of mac & cheese. My feeling is that if you're serving this for dinner you can get two adults or three children fed. If you were to follow the manufacturer's "suggestion" and serve it as a side dish, you should really just rethink the whole meal and have vegetables instead. If I'm making mac and cheese, I don't have time to make side dishes.

The box says one cup is a serving. This is not too bad but the real problem is they tell me the box makes 3 1/2 servings. I have 2 kids. I have no half kids. Why do they even make it that way? Three and a half servings means one of us will have to eat extra or only get half a serving or throw half a serving away.

Tuna also has 2 1/2 servings per can. This is a bit much. I'm not leaving the half serving in the can. I either eat the whole thing or I split the can with someone else. It's actually about 2 servings Whatever.

Don't get me started on the junk food sold in school vending machines especially the pop and milk! Most of these bottles have more than one serving. Sometimes it's two or about two or 1 1/2. No kid plans on sharing that bottle with the guy at the next desk. And no one thinks they're having more than one drink.

I understand the need to tell us equal values of everything so we can compare 8 ounces of Coke to 8 ounces of milk but the label of a single bottle that we all know one person is going to finish should have the total values displayed far more prominently. We need to know what this serving is going to be not just what the "average" serving is. And who drinks average servings anyway? The government's average is my first three sips.

Value Vision
The cereal people seemed to have realized the majority of us will be adding milk to their product so most of them tell us the values with and without milk. What I don't get is the company that tells you the value of the contents and not the product they assume you are making with it. For instance, Weight Watchers gives the Points value for 1 serving of boxed cake mix. Huh? Has anyone ever had a serving of boxed cake mix without it being cake? I don't even want to know. With all of the mixed messages from "clean your plate" to restaurants that serve you half a chicken, it's no wonder we've grown into an oversized, super sized country.

Round Up Your Measuring Spoons, Clean Up Your Chocolate Chin, Dust Off Your Kitchen Scale & Take Charge
The only thing you can really do is take charge yourself. Have decks of cards all over to remind you of what a proper serving of meat is supposed to look like or bite the bullet and splurge on a kitchen scale. You need to know that an ounce of cheese looks like an anorexic Domino. And that an ounce of nuts is smaller than the nano-portion of peanuts they serve you in coach.

You need to see what a cup of rice really looks like, what a half cup of cereal looks in your bowls and how puny a "serving" of ice-cream really is. You may need to get new bowls. We "splurged" on smaller ice cream bowls but now we can fill them up. We all know we're fooling ourselves but we sure like a full bowl better than a half empty one.