Customer Reviews

The Portion Teller: Smartsize Your Way to Permanent Weight Loss

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a terrific book. Dr. Young offers a realistic lifelong plan for permanent weight loss, as opposed to some passing fad. In her book, she presents user-friendly visuals to help estimate serving sizes, and activities to get readers engaged. Her success stories about real-life clients she has counseled are touching and very motivational to me as a dieter constantly searching for the perfect and easy diet. This book is practical and does not restrict any foods at all. In fact, I am encouraged to eat my favorite foods!

And, what I liked the most about The Portion Teller is that Young provides readers with the tools to personalize the plan to fit individual needs. "One size does not fit all," and in order for a diet plan to be successful, it needs to be realistic and individualized. Young's program does just that!! She has lots of experience to present her case, and the timelines and portion shockers displaying how portions have grown are mind blowing. This book is a must read for anyone concerned about food and weight.

The book does an excellent job of explaining portion sizes and what is a normal size meal. Will help anyone trying to drop a few pounds, or maintain her or his body weight they are at now. Good rules to follow for feeding childern-teach them at an early age what is normal proportions and they will have less problems later in life and prevent them from " super sizing" everything in site. Highly recommended.

WOW!! I love this book.



Now here is a book based on real research as well as common sense. The Portion Teller doesn't eliminate any food groups or bombard you with silly and unrealistic rules. Instead, it's about portion-control! And, you don't have to eliminate your favorite foods. You should just eat your favorite decadent treats in moderation, while eating more fruits, veggies, and other healthy choices. It makes perfect sense is very easy to follow. Here is a program for life.



I love the visual icons, the meal plans, and the food diary. And those food equations are shocking--who would have ever thought that a big steak was equivalent in protein to 18 eggs! The sidebars, charts, and portion shockers are also quite an eye opener as well as lots of fun to read. Kudos!

Although I ate good meals, portions were always a struggle for me. I found myself eating a portion as big as my husband and he is a foot taler than I am and nearly a third bigger!. No wonder I was putting on weight. The book inidcates how portions have been growing and that most of us just eat what is in front of us.

It gives practical solutions to managing portion control, by understanding what a serving is compared to a portion. What a serving actually equates to and how to choose realistic portions. Thus not being deprived of anything we like, but still being able to lose weight. It's not a diet, but a way to retrain yourself to eat.

I usually shy away from diet-type books. After all, how great can any ONE be when there are thousands coming out every year??? But I loved the idea of being able to eat whatever I want, just by looking at the sizes of my portions. This book is a great primer to the idea that it's not WHAT you eat as much as it is how MUCH you eat.

Young offers terrific real-world equivalents to help you get your chops around how many servings are in that Extra Value Meal. I am still a bit confused, though -- wish she had some additional info on how to really determine how much you need to eat, and some more translations of real menus into portion sizes. I would also love to see more success stories (love those before-and-afters!). All in all, I highly recommend this book. I checked it out from the library, but ended up marking so many pages to take notes from that I finally broke down and bought my own copy.

I just purchased this book over the weekend and I'm hooked. I've never been a follower of fad diets, but I also needed something to help me start following a better, healthier eating plan--one that I can utilize for a lifetime instead of just a matter of weeks or months.

I loved the statistical information that gave some background on portions and I like the real-world "tips/tricks" to determining portion size. This book has given me a start towards being able to control my eating habits without depriving myself of the things I truly love and enjoy.

For those of us who want to follow the USDA Pyramid guidelines but were mystified by what "one ounce" of food looks like on a plate, this book is the missing link. By relating serving sizes of common foods to everyday objects (like baseballs, walnuts, or the palm of your own hand) the Portion Teller trains your eye to recognize what a serving is... and how many of them you are eating at one sitting. It is a revelation! I was amazed by how much I was overeating; I bet you will be amazed too.

Although the book reads like a "diet book", it's really just food awareness. You CAN eat anything you want. You just can't eat as much of it as you would like. Now you can know how much is enough, and how much is too much.

As physicians who care for patients we are often confronted with the frustrations of failed attempts at weight loss. The Portion Teller will prove to be a useful tool in aiding us to manage overweight patients and hopefully end the frustrating cycle of failure seen with most conventional diets. We are leaving a copy of the book in our waiting room to help our patients understand this novel way of weight loss Sincerely.A satified physician

Fabulous!!!!!! Ms. Young book is not only for adults but also
and easy read for children. Her use of everyday items as
visual icons is not only novel but practical. Ms Young has
given us her common sense appraoch to our diet dilemas.
I recommend this book highly for those of us whose plate
runneth over.

I stumbled upon The Portion Teller after seeing it written up in the Wall Street Journal (Nov 29) as one of the six best health books of 2005. I agree with the Wall Street Journal: it really is one of the best books of 2005!! There are hundreds of books out there on weight loss and diets. But most of them do not provide time-tested tools that work over the long haul. Rather, they preach certain miracle foods, special combinations, diet food, or some other trendy gospel. The Portion Teller, on the other hand, provides a practical approach to eating healthfully and becoming aware of your portion sizes (the ultimate way to lose weight and keep it off) without having to count calories (which is what I love most), add up points, or eliminate entire food groups.
The Portion Teller is the first and only comprehensive book on portion sizes and Dr. Young is certainly the right person to author such a book. As a nutritionist and expert on portion sizes, Young tracked how growing food portions parallel the obesity epidemic plaguing America. She demonstrates this trend in a unique and fun to read WOW timeline. But Dr. Young doesn't just stop there. She shares common "portion" pitfalls faced by many of her clients, provides readers with visuals to help estimate portion sizes, offers a full program with meal plans, and gives lots of user-friendly tips to smartsize every eating experience you can think of. This book is also one of the few books that manages to makes portion-control lively, fun, and interesting. A MUST read for anyone who is trying to lose weight while living in America!