Who's on Thirds? - counting calories - Brief Article

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 1999 by Janet Charatan

This simple guide can help you keep tabs on how much you're really eating

Ahh, November. A time to give thanks. Yet all too often, along with that gratitude comes a second scoop of mashed potatoes, another glass of wine or a supersize portion of pumpkin pie. The fact is, the amount of food on our plates is often more than what manufacturers typically consider a "serving." And, if we're counting calories based on food labels, that means we're getting far more calories than we intended.

If you seem to gain weight each year around the holidays (or are constantly fighting the battle of the bulge), the problem may not be what you're eating but rather how much you're eating. "Many people have good dietary habits, but they're just eating too much, especially of calorie-dense foods like starches and pasta," says Suzanne Havala, R.D., a doctoral fellow in health policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And although according to standards developed by the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the serving size information found on nutritional labels of packaged food supposedly reflects what is customarily consumed in one sitting, when is the last time you actually stopped after 13 potato chips?

But we can't change manufacturer serving sizes, so it's up to us to know how many servings we're getting in order to keep track of our fat and calorie intake. And since it's not all that easy to envision four ounces of food, the following visual examples will help you estimate how much you're consuming.

Bear in mind, values may vary according to type and brand of food, and from figures used in the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. The pyramid counts a mere 1/2 cup of pasta, rice or cooked veggies as a serving--that way, presumably, it's less daunting to get all the healthy food you need in a day.