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Portions

Over the past few months, i have been working with my son on the concept of calories, specifically, calories and weight management. He has finally figured out that calories must be "burned" by the body or they will be "held onto" by the body as fat. He has also grasped the idea that it takes a lot more work to burn the calories than a person might initially think, going into weight management for the first time.

Now, we are working on portion sizes. This concept was tougher. The cereal box says 120 calories per serving, but it can be tough to estimate how much a serving is, not to mention that every food we consume has a different portion size. So my friend gave us some Weight Watchers serving utensils and we were excited to try them!

The next day, we served up what we discussed would be a good, healthful, balanced meal for lunch. My son helped me decide what that would be (mostly they were all his suggestions, believe it or not!) and we set to work getting it onto the table. As we used each implement to serve each component, it was fun to SEE how portion sizing works out in a real world application. For example, the scoop for starch was the same size as the scoop for vegetable, but the starch scoop was 1 serving and the vegetable scoop was 1/2 serving. The protein utensil was smaller than he expected, but provided plenty of chicken after he saw it demonstrated.


 
So we had Rotisserie Chicken, green beans, broccoli, and baked smiley potatoes. Half of our plate is green, which i reminded the kids was a really good thing! Our starch serving is much smaller than it would have been if we had just eaten what sounded good. And we didn't add any butters or oils, so we ate only the fats found naturally in the foods.

Overall, we did a pretty good job learning how to "design our meal" with the help of some portion scoopers. :)

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