A Simple Approach To Weight Managment By Mandy Conrad, MS, RD, NSCA-CPT At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

How many times a day do you say, “What should I eat?” As a registered dietitian and personal trainer, I hear this question all the time! Instead of basing my response on numerous health and physiological reasons to eat/not eat certain foods, I have come to realize that the actual question being posed is “What do I eat to lose or maintain my weight?”

My philosophy on food and diet is that all foods fit into a healthy lifestyle. I don’t think that a food should be labeled as “bad”; therefore you should never eat it. I also don’t think most foods labeled as “good” can be eaten with caution thrown to the wind. You have to learn moderation and portion control.

Now, let me ask a question. Do you read food labels? If so, what do you usually look at on a food label? While everything on a food label has a purpose, your first priority is this: review the serving size! All of the other information on the food label is based on that serving size.

Does this scenario sound familiar? You look at a bag of cookies and see that it only has 90 calories and only 1 gram of fat – so you eat the whole bag. Now look at the serving size. The bag has 25 cookies and a serving is one cookie. That means that all the information – the 90 calories and 1 gram of fat- is for one serving, or one cookie! YOU JUST AT 25 COOKIES! Even if you ate the bag over the course of a day, you still ate 2250 calories and 25 grams of fat – just from snacking on cookies throughout the day! While this example may be extreme, I hope you can see how serving sizes make those other numbers on the label really add up.

And don’t forget to look at the food labels on what you drink. A bottle of soda may seem like one serving. But if you look at the label, you will find that many soda bottles contain up to 2.5 servings. That means that the bottle of soda does not have 120 calories as the label indicates, but rather 300 calories (120 calories X 2.5 servings).

While this information may seem fairly simple – “just look at the food label”- have you tried it? Why try to turn your life upside down with radical weight loss/control schemes when you have not attempted a simple approach first? A good goal is to stick with the serving sizes. That is the simplest approach.

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