So how much is an ounce?

I have asked myself that question a lot lately, while looking up serving sizes to figure out my calories and carbohydrates. I always wonder, did I eat too much - you know, again?

A perfect example is when we ate grilled salmon a couple of weeks ago. I was really proud of myself. I had one piece of fish and limited myself to the box-suggested serving size of risotto, which was about a cup.

I cook enough to know what a cup looks like, how much a tablespoon is and other similar measurements. And if I'm not sure, I measure it out. I did that with my Cheerios when I started so I knew exactly what three-quarters of a cup looked like.

So serving myself a cup of risotto was easy.

Servings defined by weight, on the other hand, are more of a problem. Back to the salmon example.

After eating dinner that evening, I was trying to figure out my calories and carbs. I looked up sockeye salmon in my niffy Calorie King book. Then I looked at the serving size -4 ounces.

Four ounces?! I think my piece of salmon was bigger than that. But how much bigger?

My solution that evening was to count my salmon as two servings. That made me feel like a piggy.

So what's a Food Junkie to do? My diet buddy suggested looking at a cookbook to see if there is a conversion chart. Not a bad place to start. Another idea is to use a food scale.

A colleague provided some Web sites that show portion sizes. The standard  recommendation is to associate each serving with an item. For instance, a serving of meat is about the size of a deck of playing cards. A serving of fruit is the size of a tennis ball or a fist.

The Web sites gave me a good starting point to better understand portions.

Food Junkie Discovery

This week's Food Junkie Discovery is a set of online resources for serving sizes: 

USDA:

http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/Healthy/Portions_Kit/serving_size.pdf

WebMD:

http://www.webmd.com/diet/control-portion-size

AARP:

http://www.aarp.org/health/staying_healthy/eating/size_does_matter.html

Many more sites can be found by searching online for "serving size."