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Let A Baseball Be Your Guide For A One Cup Serving Of Food

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baseball-equals-one-cupIt’s awfully hard to gauge how much food you’re putting on your plate – and even harder to figure out how much food you’re popping into your mouth when you eat directly from a multi-serving bag of food – like a big bag of chips.

Portion size is critical to managing your weight.  One helpful idea is to use familiar objects as visual guides to “guesstimate” portion sizes.

One Cup Is About The Size Of A Baseball

The suggested serving size for many food items, particularly produce, is a cup. The suggested portion size for many denser items, like pasta, rice, or ice cream is a half a cup, so two servings – which is, at minimum, what most of us eat, would equal a cup.

 A Baseball, Not A Softball

A cup is about the size of a baseball – a baseball, not a softball.  So a cup of cooked greens, a cup of yogurt, a cup of beans, or a cup of cantaloupe should all look like the size of a baseball – but with obviously different calorie counts.

Here are some of the CDC’s examples of one-cup servings:

  • 1 small apple
  • 1 medium grapefruit
  • 1 large orange
  • 1 medium pear
  • 8 large strawberries
  • 1 large bell pepper
  • 1 medium potato
  • 2 large stalks of celery
  • 12 baby carrots or 2 medium carrot
  • 1 large ear of corn

It’s easy to visualize a small apple or a medium potato as about the size of a baseball.  It’s more difficult with an ear of corn!  But, for most food products it is possible to think “baseball” and pour or cut or pick (as in the case of fruit) a similarly sized portion.

This is Tip #3 for Week 3 of the “lose 5 pounds in 5 weeks challenge.”  Let everyone know how you’re doing! Post your results and/or struggles and suggestions on Eat Out Eat Well’s page on Facebook.

Traffic Light Food Choices: Red (Once In A While), Yellow (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), And Green (Probably Good)

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red-yellow-green-food-choicesHere are some tips on recognizing menu descriptions to help you make the best caloric choices (of course, portion size plays a big role, too).

Any menu item will have tons of added calories if it is:

  • smothered in sauce
  • covered or layered with cheese
  • loaded with butter, oil, cream, mayonnaise, or dressing
  • “sugared-up” even if it doesn’t taste sweet
    • made from a fatty cut of meat
    • made with hidden sugar or flour and/or some type of fat for thickening
    • a huge portion size

Green Light (Probably A Good Choice) words or phrases:

  • Barbequed
  • Blanched
  • Boiled
  • Grilled/Broiled/Charbroiled
  • Fat free
  • Garden fresh
  • Poached
  • Primavera
  • Red sauce/ Marinara
  • Roasted
  • Seasoned
  • Steamed

Quick hint:  Words ending in the letter “d” are frequently on the okay list, for instance: poached, boiled, grilled, and steamed.  Some notable exceptions are:  fried, and the “b-d” words:  buttered, battered, and breaded.

Yellow Light “Caution” Foods (Maybe Yes, Maybe No)

Words frequently used on menus to describe “yellow light foods,” should be chosen cautiously because they may or may not be healthy choices.

Yellow Light words or phrases:

  • Baked
  • BastedStir-Fried/Sauteed
  • Vegetarian
  • Vinaigrette
  • High Fiber
  • Light/Lite
  • Reduced
  • Marinated
  • Stewed
  • Panini
  • Almandine/Almondine

Red Light (Once In A While) Foods

Really think hard before eating food described with these words and phrases:

  • Au gratin/Cheesy/Parmigiana
  • Aioli
  • Alfredo
  • Battered/Encrusted/Crusted
  • Bearnaise/Hollandaise
  • Bet you can’t finish it/ Bottomless/Value/Giant/Jumbo/Loaded
  • Bisque
  • Breaded
  • Buttery / Buttered
  • Carbonara
  • Casserole
  • Chicken fried/Pan fried
  • Covered/Smothered
  • Creamed/Creamy/White Sauce/Bechamel
  • Crispy/Crunchy
  • Deluxe
  • Escalloped/Scalloped
  • Fried/Deep fried
  • Pesto
  • Stroganoff
  • Stuffed
  • Twice baked

Quick hint:  Words ending in the letter “y” should usually send up red alerts, for instance:  cheesy, crispy, crunchy.

This post is part of the 500 calorie challenge:  lose 5 pounds in 5 weeks the healthy way.

Do You Eat A Bread And Butter (or oil) Meal Before Your Meal?

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bread-butter-calorie-graphic

Do you mindlessly chow down on bread and butter or oil before a meal either because you’re hungry or because it’s there for easy nibbling?

Butter, Oil, And Bread Can Add A Big Caloric Punch

  • A tablespoon of olive oil has 119 calories, a tablespoon of butter has 102 calories, one pat of butter has around 36 calories.
  • Butter and oil are all fat; olive oil is loaded with heart healthy monounsaturated fat, butter is filled with heart unhealthy saturated fat.
  • Bread varies significantly in calories depending on the type of bread and the size of the piece. Harder breads and breadsticks are often less caloric than softer doughy breads.
  • Most white bread and a small piece
  •  of French bread averages around 90 to 100 calories a slice. Dinner rolls average 85 calories each.
  • If you’re eating Mexican food, bread may not appear, but a basket of chips adds around 500 calories.

Who Takes In More Calories – Butter Or Olive Oil Eaters?

In a study done by the food psychology laboratory at Cornell University found that people who put olive oil on a piece of bread consume more fat and calories than butter users even though they end up eating fewer pieces of bread.

The researchers found that olive oil users:

  • used 26% more olive oil on each slice of bread compared to block butter users (40 vs. 33 calories)
  • ate 23% less bread over the course of a meal than butter users taking in 17% fewer bread calories:  264 calories (oil users) vs. 319 calories (butter users).

Can you see how you can easily save close to 500 calories by nixing the bread or chip basket?

This post is a tip for the 500 calorie challenge:  lose 5 pounds in 5 weeks.

NEAT: A Great Way To Burn Calories Without Intentionally Exercising

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NEAT graphicNon-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the energy you expend for everything that isn’t sleeping, eating or doing sports-like exercise. NEAT helps burn calories and comes from activities like walking to work, doing the laundry or yard work, cooking, or pacing while you talk on the phone.

Most of us sit too much.  Someone who sits at a desk takes about 5,000 to 6,000 steps a day .  On average, a man living in an Amish community who takes about 18,000 steps a day and a woman takes14,000 steps.

Our modern way of life has given us lots of NEAT-squelching tools:  smart phones , ipads, microwaves, remote controls, electric toothbrushes, even robotic vacuum cleaners.  As a result, we need to consciously devise ways to build back some activity into daily life.

Simple examples could be walking the dog a block more; walking to a deli a few blocks away to pick up lunch; having some walk-and-talk meetings during the day; pacing when you’re on the phone; getting off the bus a block earlier; and moving around the playground with your kids instead of sitting on the park bench.

If you incorporate some of these ideas into your day, you can burn hundreds of extra calories a day.

Fidgeting

Fidgeting doesn’t help much with calorie burn or weight loss. Research shows that the secret to burning fat is to get up, move around, and walk. Initially NEAT was labeled as a fidgeting phenomenon, but the NEAT researchers point out that you wouldn’t be able to fidget enough in a day to burn 800 calories.

The researchers believe that fidgeting is the body’s way of telling you to get up and move. Bodies want to move, but the environment and technology makes if very easy to not have to move around.

Some NEAT Examples To Burn An Additional 500 Calories

  1. Taking an hours worth of phone calls while standing up and pacing burns 100 to 130 calories, while making phone calls for an hour while sitting at your desk burns 15 calories.
  2. Walking for 30 minutes at lunch and then sitting and eating for 15 minutes burns 100-130 calories.  If you sat for 45 minutes while eating you’d burn 25 calories.
  3. Having a one hour walking meeting burns 150-200 calories.  A seated one hour meeting burns 15.

 

 

 

Who Sets the Pace When You Eat With Others?

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eat-more-with-other-people

You tend to mimic your table companions. They eat fast, you eat fast.  They eat a lot, you eat a lot.  Ever wonder why you look at some families or couples and they’re both either heavy or slender?  As Brian Wansink, PhD says in his book, Mindless Eating, “birds of a feather eat together.”

How Much More Do You Eat When There Are Others At The Table?

Research has shown how strong the tendency is to increase how much you eat when you eat with others.  Compared to eating alone you eat, on average:

  • 35% more if you eat with one other person
  • 75% more with four at the table
  • 96% more with a group of seven or more

Why?

Eating more when you’re in larger groups compared to when you eat alone is common for adults. One reason is a phenomenon called “social facilitation,” or actions that are stimulated by the sight and sound of other people doing the same that that you’re doing. When you’re eating in groups, social facilitation helps override your brain’s normal signals of satiety – allowing you to eat more even when you’re not hungry.

Calorie Savers:

  • Think about how many people you’re eating with, who they are, and why you’re out to dinner with them.  If you want to have a blast and don’t care about how much you eat – eat with a big group and chow down.
  • If you want to be careful about what and how much you eat, think about eating lunch with your salad (dressing on the side, please) friends rather than the pepperoni pizza group.
  • You tend to adjust your eating pace to that of your companions, so sit next to the slow eaters rather than the speed eaters if you’re trying to control how much goes into your mouth.

This is part of Week 2 of the lose 5 pounds in 5 weeks challenge.  How are you doing?  Post what you’re doing on Facebook and remember to “Like” EatOutEatWell while you’re there.  Follow us on Pinterest and Twitter, too.