Strength for Her

One reason that so many Americans struggle with their weight is that serving sizes have dramatically increased over the years. It’s easy overestimate what makes an individual serving. You may be surprised to see that many times it’s only a fraction of what we typically allow ourselves to eat. It can be easy to overindulge when we don’t look at this information carefully.

For example, some larger soda and juice bottles have 1.5 or 2 serving in a single bottle. Many people would assume that a bottle is a single serving. If you only glance at the calorie content, you’ll only see half or ¾ of what the total calories are for the entire bottle. This is why it’s so important to take this information into consideration. There’s no reason you can’t have two servings, but you should know that you’re then taking in twice the calories as listed in the nutritional info, and plan the rest of your food intake accordingly (check out How to Read Nutritional Information for more info).

It can be harder figure out portion size for cooked foods, especially those that don’t have nutritional information readily available, like fresh meats and produce. This is when a site like fitday.com can be very useful.

Even so, it can be hard to approximate what a cup of pasta or rice looks like when cooked. The chart below can be helpful. Don’t worry – although this information can be overwhelming at first, after practicing it for awhile it will become second nature. You won’t have to look up calorie content forever.