Nutrition Trick: Measure Everything

With the exception of an occasional holiday – I stuffed myself (almost) shamelessly a couple of weekends ago due to it being the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend – I tend to be very conscious of portion sizes and nutritional intake. Caloric estimations are not too terribly difficult for me, as I often check calorie content and portion sizes. Every now and then I will use measuring cups to monitor all my servings so that I can refresh my memory as to what one cup of cooked pasta or tomato sauce looks like. Having a stash of scoop style measuring cups and spoons on hand is an extremely valuable tool. After all, do you actually know what one tablespoon of smooth peanut butter actually looks like well enough to estimate it when digging in the jar with your knife? Measure it each time for a few weeks and you’ll figure it out.

There are a number of foods that are very easy to overdo if you don’t know what a single serving consists of and what that serving looks like when you plate it. Topping my personal list of things-that-are-easy-to-eat-too-much-of are:

1) Juice. Good, healthy, high-in-calorie 100% juice. I love orange juice, but a single serving. Bolthouse Farms 100% orange juice is 110 calories per 8 ounce serving. Many people will down two cups of OJ in a single sitting, bringing in their energy consumption in at around 200 cals. Adding to the problem is that because juice lacks all of the meaty bits of the original fruit, we don’t feel nearly as full when we consume it. So we would drink more calories in fruit juice than we would consume eating the whole fruit in order to feel the same level of ‘fullness’. And of course, with juice you don’t benefit from the fibre content in the whole fruit nor from the huge amount of nutrition you get from many fruit peels (such as apple, grape, orange pith, etc).

2) Pasta. A serving of pasta is approximately on cup cooked. Restaurant portions are usually closer to two cups. Most people will pile on far more than one cup on their plate. Many will squawk that one cup would be way too little, without knowing what one cup of spaghetti looks like. I know that I used to think that before I started measuring anything. Yesterday, I measured out one cup of cooked spaghetti just to be sure that my portioning is still within guidelines, and I happily discovered that the measured cup of cooked spaghetti was actually more than I’ll often allow.

3) Cereal. This is a big one. When was the last time you actually read the nutritional content on the side of the box and looked at what is considered to be one serving? Do you know how much a serving of Cheerios is, compared to a serving of Raisin Bran, muesli, or granola cereal? Do you know the caloric differences between them? One serving of Honey Nut Cheerios is 3/4 cup and contains 110 calories, versus a serving of granola cereal like Harvest Crunch, which is 2/3 cup and contains 220 calories. Now how much cereal do you normally dump into your bowl? Many people will pour in as much as it would take to nearly fill the bowl, way overshooting the actual portion size as labelled on the box. Crack out those measuring cups and scoop your cereal out that way instead - you might find that you normally eat a bit more or a bit less than the recommended serving size, but with the measuring cups you can at least track what you are eating with some degree of accuracy.



As an extra note, yes I am fallible when it comes to eating. Earlier this week, I went out for lunch with a former professor of mine and made the mistake of not only scarfing down a considerable amount of food at the buffet, but also a full piece of pumpkin pie and slice of cheesecake. This is not normal for me, and my gut informed me of its ire via a bout of indigestion that lasted until the following morning.