Change the Way You Eat
by Susan Bernstein
excerpted from the Arthritis Foundation book Change Your Life!

Portion Control - The Best New Buzzword
Even when you eat foods that are low in fat or relatively low in calories, the amount you eat is the most important factor. You will want to keep the number of calories you eat per day within a healthy range, but you still want to eat a variety of foods for taste and nutrition. And you will want to eat enough to keep you satisfied.

You can eat almost any type of food  and still stay within a healthy range of calories for the day. You simply have to decide how you will spend your budget of calories. Higher-calorie foods, such as french fries, will use up more of your budget than baked potato chips. If you want to budget your calories wisely, look at the sizes of the portions you are eating. Portion control is the most important diet buzzword you need to know. One of the biggest reasons so many Americans are overweight is that they have no concept of healthy food portions.

While it is important to consider the type of foods you are eating, it's really more important to look at the quantity of food you eat. Many people know the right kinds of food to eat. They know that baked chicken is more nutritious than fried chicken, for example. But many people have no concept of how much food is too much - and that misconception is a major contributing factor in their weight problem.

If the average adult female needs about 1,600 calories a day, does she need to eat a 1,200 calorie plate of pasta and meatballs at one meal? The answer is no - a portion size of pasta is one-half cup.  But most of us have become used to eating larger and larger portions, and we feel deprived by going back to eating reasonable portions of food.

Many people underestimate how much  they really eat at a typical meal. Like many Americans, you have come to expect large portions at restaurants, but instead of eating half the meal and taking the other half home (or sharing it with your dining partner), you eat the whole, gigantic portion. The result: You feel stuffed, sluggish and probably consume too many calories than you need in a day.

When it comes to eating, most people are driven by what they see, not by how they feel. Your hunger is driven by instinct. By putting too much food in front of you, you will perceive this oversized meal as normal. If you change that habit, and start serving yourself smaller portions, you will perceive this smaller amount as a normal meal.

There are a few easy ways to determine healthy portion sizes  for the various foods you eat.

On packaged foods, look at the "serving size" measurement on the nutrition label  of the food's package. If you look on a box of cookies, and the serving size is two cookies, that means one portion is two cookies - not six cookies.

When following a recipe, look for how many "servings" the recipe makes. If the recipe says "serves four," that means that one portion is one fourth of the total amount of the food you prepare by following the ingredients and measurements in the recipe.