Can the nutrition facts label help get your portion sizes right?
Why yes it can! Label reading can be your guiding light to healthy eating, if you know what you’re looking at.
And if you’re trying to reign your portion sizes in, you really only need to focus on 2 main areas.
Once you get the hang of label reading, it’ll become the foundation for the way you choose food. And that will help you decide what food you eat.
The way you grocery shop will never be the same.
Figuring out when you’re treating yourself is only round 1.
Knowing how much to eat is the main event.
If you don’t read anything else on the nutrition fact labels, you should be reading these two things.
SERVING SIZE + SERVINGS PER CONTAINER
This is where you start. Always and forever.
This part of a nutrition facts label answers the 2 biggest questions about the package of food in your hands.
- SERVING SIZE tells you exactly how much should you eat.
- SERVINGS PER CONTAINER tells you how many times you should eat that amount, of that thing, from that package.
WARNING: What’s on the label ONLY counts for ONE serving.
That means all the calories, fat, sodium, and everything else listed on the label is just what’s in a single serving.
FOR EXAMPLE
Let’s say we’re talking about a box of mac and cheese.
A serving size is 2/3 a cup, and there are 8 servings per container.
I don’t know about you, but first thing I notice is how labels can make things SO confusing with these weird amounts that no one would ever actually use.
2/3 of a cup? Seriously?
So let’s make this as easy as possible to understand.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If you were able to serve 8 people mac and cheese from this one box, everyone would get exactly what you see on the nutrition facts label.
Whatever the calories, fat, protein, and carbs are written on the label, is what each person would get.
This also means if you eat the whole package of mac and cheese by yourself, you’ll have to multiply all the calories, fat, sodium and everything else on the label by 8.
You’re multiplying it by 8 because that’s the number of servings of mac and cheese in the entire container.
And you just ate the whole thing. Without 7 other people.
That means in one sitting, for one quick dinner:
- 100 calories becomes 800 calories
- 2g of fat becomes 16g of fat
- 20g of carbs becomes 160g carbs
It can get really ugly, really fast.
Next up: CALORIES
If you imagine the average meal should be about 500-700 calories and the average snack is about 100-200 calories, it becomes a lot easier to figure out if what you’re eating is the size of a snack or most of a meal.
FOR EXAMPLE
1 serving of mac and cheese at 230 calories as a side dish with veggies and some protein is pretty reasonable.
You might even call it a balanced meal.
But if you eat half the box – because 2/3 cup really isn’t that much – you’ll be eating 4 servings.
Suddenly your healthy dinner side dish turns into a much less healthy 920 calories meal (230 calories x 4 servings).
This is almost 2 meals worth of calories coming from mac and cheese in one sitting.
Or if you innocently grabbed some mac and cheese for a quick snack, it can become meal-size in a matter of minutes.
Always remember, those calories on the nutrition facts label are only talking about a single serving.
Anything you eat beyond that one serving starts the clock ticking, as it’s adding up the extras.
A LITTLE ATTENTION IS ALL YOU NEED
It’s pretty nuts how fast these things can add up.
Especially if it doesn’t even fill you up and you’re still reaching for something else to finish the job. If you’re struggling with portion control, simply knowing how much is in what you’re about to eat can go a long way.
Because let’s face it, the chip company doesn’t get anything from encouraging us to eat only half the bag.
It’s up to us to take that 1 minute to see how much we’re about to eat and then decided if it’s worth it.
The power of portion sizes, hidden in the nutrition facts label.
Now you know.