I think I will just continue to face defeat in getting control of my weight if I don't somehow manage to get control of the portions I eat. No matter how healthy my cooking is, if I eat too much of it, I will not lose weight. Indeed, I will probably gain weight.
What, however, is a serving size? Good ol' Wikipedia, once more, comes to the rescue with this article on serving size.
No wonder we can get confused about serving size! There are actually two kinds (serving size in the food pyramid and serving size on nutrition labels), and they are each based on different criteria. Yikes! What's a poor foodie to do?
Worse, different foods have different serving sizes. One egg is a serving all by itself, but a serving of meat measures about the size of a deck of cards. Celery comes in stalks but can be chopped to fit into a cup. Which is used for serving size?
Don't even try to think about how many servings to have in a day. Nobody even agrees on those for normal bodies much less metabolically impaired ones.
No wonder Americans have no clue about food. Guidelines are in conflict. Information sources contradict each other. Food marketing attempts to brainwash us into making food choices that are profitable for corporations but deadly for our bodies. Our local foodways channel our food choices to comfortable and familiar foods which are similarly deadly (have some more gravy, honey). And there is no easy way to get control of what we eat if we can't figure out how much of it to eat.
Well, this rambles, I know. I just tried to figure out serving size and got a brain freeze. The problem is way bigger than I thought. I guess I was hoping to find out that "3 cups of food per day" or some simple formula for calculating intake would pop up on these interwebs, and I could go back to thinking about flavor. No today. *sigh*
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