IN THIS ISSUE: Keeping Proportions in Proportion You Are What You Eat RECIPE MAKEOVER        Refried Beans FOOD OF THE MONTH        Beans RECIPES        Vegetarian Enchiladas        Sweet Potato and Vegetable Soup        Raspberry Pear Tart        Lentil Salad

et's do a little visualization exercise: Close your eyes and picture a door knob. Hold it in your hand and feel how much space it takes up in your hand. Now picture yourself at a dinner table with a big bowl of rice in front of you. How much will you serve yourself? Will the rice be about the size of a doorknob, a hockey puck, or a can of soup?

Open your eyes now and you will discover that although you could serve yourself as much rice as you wanted, a standard serving of rice is just 2-cup, about the size of a doorknob or a rice cake. A hockey puck would be a double serving of rice, and a 16-ounce can of soup is equivalent to four servings of rice. The same 2-cup serving size holds true for cooked pasta, mashed potatoes, cous cous, barley, and most other cooked grains. Pretty eye-opening, eh?

Most of the year I put a lot of emphasis on specific foods you should eat, but since most people mistakenly believe that what they eat is more important for weight control than how much they eat, I want to start the New Year off with a review of how much you should eat no matter what type of food you choose.

Let's start with the grains, which include bread, cereal, rice, crackers, pasta, waffles, pancakes, corn and potato chips, tortillas, popcorn, oatmeal, barley, quinoa, bulgur, and wild rice. A serving of bread is one 28-gram slice (1 ounce). The 1-ounce serving rule also holds true for cold cereal, crackers, chips, and tortillas. If you don't have a food scale at home, you can usually figure out the volume (in cups) of a serving of these foods from the nutrition facts panel, under the Serving Size heading. Additionally, 2 cups of popped popcorn, a 4-inch in diameter pancake, and a half of a hamburger bun or English muffin are considered standard servings.

Don't worry if you just realized that you ate 4 servings of spaghetti and 2 servings of garlic bread for dinner last night. What's important to understand is that it's fine to eat more than 1 serving at a meal but, unless you're a professional athlete, you don't want to eat more than 2 or 3 servings from the grain group at each meal. Check the Daily Serving Chart on the next page to see how many total servings you need per day. Also, most of your choices should be whole grains, like whole-wheat and whole-grain breads, cereal, and pasta, brown rice, old fashioned oats, corn tortillas, and baked corn chips. These more nutritious alternatives can help you feel more satisfied earlier on in a meal, and can keep your energy up for longer between meals.

So if you've just learned that you need to cut back on your grain servings, you may be wondering what to eat to replace some of the foods you're eliminating. Vegetables would be an excellent choice-they're very low in calories and high in health-promoting nutrients. If you've never been a big fan of vegetables, here's some good news for you: a serving is just 2 cup! That's about 5 broccoli florettes, 10 French fries (if you must), 5 asparagus spears, or 1 carrot. Raw lettuces are the exception with 1 cup of raw leaves counting as a serving. The trick now is to eat more than the minimum number of servings each day. The bare minimum is 3 servings, but that's only for young children and inactive women.

Another important food group to emphasize is fruit. Most people who don't care for vegetables can tolerate fruit thanks to its natural sugars. Like vegetables, fruit offers disease-fighting nutrients and fiber, while remaining low in calories. A serving of fruit is 2 cup of cut or cooked fruit, and if you're eating a whole piece, it should be about the size of a tennis ball. Lots of people love to drink fruit juice, and though it is nutritious, it's higher in calories and is missing the fiber found in the whole fruit. Six ounces (w cup) of fruit or vegetable juice is a serving.

Next up is the high-calcium dairy group, which also includes calcium-fortified soy milk, cheese, and yogurt products. A serving of milk or yogurt is an 8-ounce cup (about the size of most single-serving yogurt containers), and a serving of cheese is 12 ounces, about the size of a floppy disc or 4 dice. Most of us don't have adequate amounts of calcium in our diets, since milk often gets replaced by soda and other caloric beverages. If you're trying to lose weight and/or maintain healthy bones, it's important to make a concerted effort to include 2 to 3 servings of nonfat dairy products and other calcium-rich foods like fortified breakfast cereals and juices, broccoli, spinach, almonds, beans, and tofu each day.

Meat and other high-protein foods have received a lot of attention recently and there is much confusion surrounding how much protein we should be eating. Most people are eating portions that exceed their daily requirements in just one meal. A serving of meat, chicken, pork, turkey, and fish is just 3 ounces-the size of a deck of cards, the palm of a woman's hand or a checkbook (without the cover). That means that the 10-ounce steak you get at most restaurants is 3 servings. Even the most active people only need 3 servings total for an entire day. Almost all foods contain protein, even pasta and vegetables, so it's easy to rack up enough protein if you eat a healthy, balanced diet. Frankly, we should be emphasizing more plant proteins, like beans, soy, and nuts, in our diets since they can help reduce the risks of heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers when they replace animal proteins. A serving of cooked beans, such as kidney, garbanzo, black, soy, and lentil, is 2 cup-equivalent to 3 of a serving of meat. You can use beans to supplement the amount of meat on your plate by eating, for example, a chicken burrito with 2 ounces of chicken and 2 cup of black beans. One egg, 2 tablespoons of nut butter, and 3 cup of nuts are also equivalent to 1 ounce of meat. Try an omelet for dinner made with 1 whole egg and 4 egg whites instead of 3 ounces of pork.

Fats and sweets are another hot topic lately, and you're probably aware that a serving from this group is more like a single 1-inch cookie than a jumbo Frisbee-sized one. It's difficult to estimate the amount of fat in your food if you didn't prepare it yourself, so it's a good idea to overestimate the amount of fat in prepared foods. A serving of oil, butter, margarine, and mayonnaise is 1 teaspoon. One tablespoon is the standard for salad dressing and cream cheese. Not all fats are unhealthy, and we need to emphasize these healthy mono- and polyunsaturated fats from olive and canola oils, flax seeds and flax oil, nuts, avocado, and fatty fish. Fats that occur naturally in foods and that are added to your food should make up about 20-30% of your total daily calories, and though this may seem like a lot, most of us get all the fat we need without really trying, so don't start slathering your food in olive oil.

I hope that you now realize just how important a role portions play in achieving a healthy weight and eating a balanced diet. If you're ready to start practicing portion control, you should dine with your measuring cups and spoons. Graduated dry measuring cups are indispensable in this process. Use the half-cup size to serve yourself grains and vegetables. Keep a deck of cards handy to compare meat, fish and poultry servings or be proactive and have our meat cutters cut your purchases into 4-ounce pieces (figuring that you'll lose an ounce in the cooking process). A food scale is useful, but not a necessary investment. Get creative and devise your own tools for helping you estimate serving sizes-maybe use a computer mouse instead of a deck of cards. Practice is essential, since you won't have the luxury of measuring cups or other tools when you eat at a restaurant or at someone else's home. Teach yourself what a standard serving looks like on your plate and recalibrate your estimating ability once a month by bringing out your new tools.

Daily Serving Chart

Type of Food	Women, older adults, children ages 2-6 (~ 1,600 calories)	Very active women, men, children over 6, teen girls (~ 2,200 calories)	Very active men, teen boys (~ 2,800 calories)
Whole Grains	6 servings	9 servings	11 servings
Vegetables	3 servings	4 servings	5 servings
Fruits	2 servings	3 servings	4 servings
Nonfat Dairy	2-3 servings	2-3 servings	2-3 servings
Lean Meats, Fish and other Proteins	2 servings	2 servings	3 servings
Monounsaturated, Polyunsaturated, and Omega-3 Fats	10 teaspoons*	14 teaspoons*	17 teaspoons*

*Based on 25% of total calories