When I suggested a few months ago that eating pre-packaged food helped me to learn about portion sizing and control, I caught some heat for eating such unhealthy, sodium-ladened food. Still, it was useful in teaching myself to gauge healthy portion sizes; I still recommend it for someone just learning to restrict their calories.
But good golly I wish I had seen this genius gallery on Wisegeek.com a few months ago, where 200-calorie portions of food are photographed on the same plate, highlighting the sometimes surprising disparity in volume between different foods. As seen above, 200 calories gets you a whole mess of celery, half a Jack-in-the-Box cheeseburger, or a tiny hunk of butter. (The worst for me was the hunk of cheddar cheese, which I’ve been known to plow through at breakneck speed—and I thought it was the crackers I was eating it on that were bad!)
What Does 200 Calories Look Like? [Wisegeek via Digg]
6 Responses to “200-Calorie Food Gallery”
- 1 Trackback on Jan 4th, 2007 at 3:48 am
- 2 Trackback on Jan 5th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I have the same problem you have with the cheddar cheese, Joel. I can plow through that thing like an old man sending soup back at a deli. As I have realized, it is something I am consciously cutting back on.
I think these pictures are way off. Take the butter, for example–the website says that 28 grams of butter has 200 calories. 28 grams is approximately one ounce. A stick of butter is four ounces. That picture doesn’t look like a quarter of a stick of butter to me.
I eat a lot of pre-packaged food which has helped in my weight loss, and my sodium levels tend to be about the recommended. Some days it’s higher, some it’s lower, and I’m finding out more and more which foods generally are more balanced. Eating pre-packaged meals as a start is a hell of a lot better than just winging it, or doing nothing…You have to start somewhere.
I saw this list the other day too and I wrote about it. In addition to my ‘meals’ I try to add in a lot of fruits and veggies, and the photos actually made me crave carrots and not chocolate. I thought that was really cool.
I sympathize on the cheese, I used to do that too ;)
Sean: looks like a quarter stick to me…it’s a big plate? :)
Sean, the stick of butter is a full stick, not the quarters your used to at the store, so your right it would be a 1/4 of a stick of butter, but you can also buy butter in slabs that equal 4 normal sticks, which is what people who cook with a lot of butter normally do.