Nutrition: Serving Sizes - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.
Serving sizes are the most Important thing to keep in mind when you are looking at making any kind of a dietary change because most people do not count calories and calories are kind of meaningless. So, forget the calories, forget the points. Look at what is actually on your plate. That is the most important thing. How much is going in your body. So when you are thinking about serving sizes there are a few key things to remember. If you can go to your kitchen and just get out a set of measuring cups and a set of measuring spoons that will be really, really helpful. Just to have a to be able to eyeball things. You can even just leave them out on your counter during the day and kind of guesstimate as you are building your plate. Yeah, you do not need to actually use it unless you want to get really specific.
When you are looking at fruits and vegetables, you are looking at about a cup. Now that is a cup cut up. You may plunk an apple in there and the apple is going to stick over the top. But if you actually were to cut it up it is roughly a cup, same with berries, same with squash, same with watermelon. All of those things is roughly a cup cut up. So that is your serving size for fruits and vegetables. When you are looking at grains, grains when they you are measuring these cooked now, not raw, not dry. Half a cup is your serving size for that. So we are really minimizing grains these days for a lot of reasons. Mostly because we do not really need that much starch and we want a lot more of the fiber in our diets to help take care of some of the fats and some of the proteins and some of the toxins that come into the system. So think about a half of cup. It is not very much. I mean if you look at that that just a little tiny bit, but that is not really the focus of your meal.
The focus of your meal is more on the protein. When you are looking at proteins, one of the best proteins for snacks is nuts. Nuts come in all different sizes and shapes so again we are looking at kind of roughly guesstimating these things. So you are looking at about a quarter of a cup. A quarter of a cup is again pretty small and if you think about it often times what I tell people when you are out and about and you do not have a quarter of a cup measure is to think about if you were to dip your hand into a bag of almonds and hold the other hand flat and pour the almonds on top of that other hand it is what would stay on your hand. Not doing, not cupping it, not trying to hold onto as much as you can but leaving it open flat. You end up with roughly about 15 almonds and that is about a quarter of a cup.
When you are looking at other proteins like animal proteins and meats and things, you are really looking at about a three ounce serving. You can look at that as roughly the size of your cell phone, all you iphone users out there. That is about the size if you are looking at the shape and size of a piece of meat that might be on your plate. A way to look at in terms of well how thick does that mean. Does it mean it is the Dagwood sandwich but it is that wide? It is about the width of your palm of your hand. So it is about that thickness. That is really what you are looking at. If you wanted to have a little bit more on the protein side, I had be Ok with that. When you are looking at liquids, and this is really, really, really important when you are thinking about how do I get enough water into my day. And I always ask everybody that talks to me, how much water, water not anything else but water are you getting in.
What you are really looking for is roughly this much every day. It this looks a little intimidating because it is one ginormous bottle so what I tend to tell people is to use this sort of thing when you are on a car trip so that you only have one big bottle. When you need something smaller, take something you can carry around with you. Put aw, this is mine. I put stickers all over it. I prefer glass but this is about half of what you need in a day. So if you fill it up once in the morning and have it done by lunch, and then fill it up again in at lunch time and have it done by dinner, you are pretty good to go. If you really want to do it more in the cup by cup, that latte mode that everybody has at home or just about everybody. That is about sixteen ounces. When people measure water they are talking about an eight ounce glass. So this gives you two for one. So if can fill this up and leave it on your desk and have it in front of you just sip over the course of the day and you do two of these in the morning and two of these in the afternoon, you are pretty close to good to go. If you do more exercising, you do a lot of sweating, you are outside and it is really hot, you need to increase that water intake. But those are some really basic ways to look at serving sizes and start thinking about how to build your plate.
