Customer Reviews

The Portion Teller Plan: The No Diet Reality Guide to Eating, Cheating, and Losing Weight Permanently

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book does an excellent job of explaining how those super-size portions
we buy relate to what a normal size meal should look like. Young will help
anyone trying to drop a few pounds without feeling like they are a rigid
diet. And they won't be hungry!! Great guidelines to follow both for adults
and children. I love the sample meal plans, snacks and visuals. And the
timelines tracking how portions have crept up is an amazing eye opener.
Great book!

It works. You can lose weight!

This book is THE solution to weight loss: becoming aware of your portions. It works. I suggest you try it. My co-worker lost weight using this book, so I decided to try it for myself. Don't worry--you will not have to eat tiny portions or count calories, and be hungry, and it does not even feel like a diet. Young provides tips, tricks, and solutions for every situation you may be faced with and for every eating style around. The 30 day diary helps alot.

Same as the first except in the back there is a 30day portion tracker. But either way the information is great. The first book has helped me to lose 30 pounds so far. I'll keep this book at work and leave the other at home.

The Portion Teller Plan adds to Ms. Young's prior book, The Portion Teller. In this book, she provides a number of helpful work sheets. These let readers / eaters track what and how much they consume. Further, The Portion Teller Plan is a paperback, so it is easy to carry around (like to restaurants).

As in The Portion Teller, Young says that bad diet and weight gain come more from how MUCH we eat than from what we eat. The Portion Teller Plan is full of useful, practical advice on how to correctly estimate and control portion sizes. The examples are terrific. The small boxed-in reality checks are both amusing and, to some extent, shocking.

I found Th Portion Teller Plan to be fascinating , with all sorts of interesting facts, stories and tidits. More importantly, this book is a practical, real-world, useful, tested means of taking control of your diet and managing your weight. I highly recommend it.

Found the information to be helpful and easy to read and understand. Gives a more practical way to judge portion size.

This book is down-to-earth and a common sense way to tackle weight control. Pick it up, read and get started right away.

What was good about this book:

The visual cues (a baseball, golf ball, deck of cards or walnut) are great ways to guestimate how much you are eating and help you prevent overeating, especially if you eat at restaurants often.

The book was very easy to read and, for the most part, entertaining and engaging. I really felt compelled to read the entire thing.

It's also chock full of interesting little facts about portions in America, especially regarding how much they've grown over recent years. Some of it was pretty eye-opening, even for me, and I've read a lot on nutrition.

The back of the book has a nice little appendix you can use as a food journal, and it specially helps you track how many portions you've had.

What I did not like:

Young emphasizes the importance of eating dairy every day. The fact is, research on the nutritional benefits of dairy is all over the place.

A vast number of human beings are lactose intolerant. The reason? Humans are not meant to consume dairy products after infancy. Genetically, we're all supposed to lose the enzyme that helps us process lactose (the sugar in milk) after we're weaned (which used to be ages 2-3, but now is much more likely to be 8 mos-1 year). It's just not meant to be part of our diets, which makes sense--humans evolved on a hunter/gatherer diet. They didn't keep herds and, therefore, had nothing to milk. And they certainly didn't have the time (or place) to sit around making cheese or yogurt or butter. So once you were weaned off mom, you never had milk again.

Ok, so we're not supposed to eat it. It makes some people sick if they cannot process it. And studies have shown that dairy can occasionally interact with other foods we eat in a negative fashion. (For example, a recent study showed that the proteins in milk may destroy the helpful antioxidants found in tea, so if you drink tea with milk, you don't get any of the usual benefits).

However, there are also numerous studies that show that dairy has many benefits. For example, dairy has been shown to raise levels of calcitriol in the blood stream, which can help with calcium absorption, the regulation of blood sugar, as well as other benefits (like weight loss!). And this benefit is only seen in consuming dairy--not supplements or other sources of calcium.

With that said, I would hesitate to ever blankly recommend someone eat dairy every single day without providing them with both the positives and negatives associated. Plus, uh, a lot of people can't eat dairy (even with Lactaid), and she never says what they should do to get an adequate amount of calcium and vitamin D.

Second, while the book does say that "extremely active" people should stick with the higher range of the portions she lays out (while older or sedentary people should go with the lower range), Young never goes into detail about what "extremely active" means, nor does she delve at all into if you should up your protein if you're actively trying to build muscle.

I know the book is supposed to be for the general population, and not for body builders, but considering she repeats herself quite often throughout the book, and considering it's not overly long right now in page-length, I felt she could have spent a little more depth on planning portions around an exercise program. Like, if you're burning 600-700 calories at the gym each morning, go with 8 grain servings, 5 veggies, 4 fruits, 3 dairy, 4 protein, etc.

Overall I'd say this is a great book for people who only exercise a little and are generally looking to lose weight. Especially anyone who currently has a difficult time estimating how many calories he/she consumes every day (like people who eat out a lot) and anyone who thinks he/she isn't eating a balanced diet.