Since reading The Portion Teller, I have lost 20 pounds without
dieting. Dr. Young's program helped to teach me portion-size awareness and the visuals she provides really helped me to eyeball my portion sizes. The program is easyto follow, the meal plans are well-balanced and simple, and best of all, it WORKS. This is really a terrific program and can work for all types of "portion personalities." Dr. Young also provides terrific strategies to "smartsize" many of your eating experiences including dining at restaurants and shopping in the supermarket. I suggest trying them. Yes, you can still eat out in restaurants and follow The Portion Teller program. And you do not have to just eat lettuce leaves and boring foods. This book is also filled with useful and fun anecdotes about growing portion sizes which are fun to read and will not be found anywhere else.

Dr. Young, a noted nutritionist, has written a very practical guide to permanent weight loss. Her book is an enjoyable read with easy to use visuals. The book helped me to develop portion-size awareness and lose weight without getting neurotic about counting calories. I highly recommend it!

Dr. Young's book is a well-researched and practical guide to both helping to explain as well as solve our obesity crisis. An established nutritionist and researcher, Dr. Young is highly qualified to offer diet and nutrition advice that works. In The Portion Teller, she presents lots of evidence and useful tidbits about how portions have grown. As a clinician, she illustrates useful and heart warming stories about how her clients struggling with weight issues have beat the battle of the bulge. As a constant dieter, I found her stories and solutions motivating, and having "been there and done that," Dr. Young offers novel solutions to common everyday food problems which mostly every dieter struggling with weight can relate to. In fact, what I like most about her approach is that she offers an individualized plan that works for different types of eating styles and she does not preach "do this, and don't do that!" like many other books. Instead, she offers a lifestyle approach and realistic program for healthy eating. And, best of all, there is no going off the program and there is no failure (a word we dieters do not embrace well).



This program is likely to appeal to "real" people who eat "real" food and live in the "real" world. The visuals are easy to relate to and the meal plans are simple and do not require elaborate cooking skills. Dr. Young also illustrates mind-blowing food equivalents that have helped me to look at food in a whole new way. Who would have thought that eating a steak is equivalent to eating 18 eggs? This book is a comprehensive well-thought out book and a real eye-opener. Congratulations to a winner!

To a beginner in the weight loss game, "The Portion Teller" is a good look at the supersizing of America. Why we have gained weight and what we can do to take it off.

However, for anyone who has attempted to take weight off in the past, the book offers nothing new. The author says she looked to see "if there was a connection between the trend toward supersized food portions and weight gain. To my surprise there was no research. Nobody seem to have done any...In fact very few people even noticed that our food portions were growing so quickly." I am not sure where Ms. Young looked but information on growing portions sizes has been around for years. In fact she shares a number of references that have published information on portion sizes in the back of her book.

She presents her information as if it was new material, but much of what she shares is old news. Carrie Liatt Wiatt authored excellent books on portion sizes and weight control such as Portion Savvy in the late 90's.

Ms.Young shares a method where you don't have to count calories but instead can use the eyeball method ie 1 portion of rice looks like 1/2 a baseball. Eyeballing portions has been practised for years by Weight Watchers members - nothing new here.

Ms. Young suggest you follow simple steps to a slimmer you. These include writing down everything you eat, recording your portions, placing them in the right food group, breaking it into standard serving sizes, tallying up the food servings,
crossing it off your diary and including water. Sounds like a lot of work. Richard Simmons must have thought so because many years ago he suggested the same thing only he simplified the process by selling cardboard cutouts where you could slide the window over a picture of the food group you had eaten - made it even easier.

Ms. Young does give very detailed descriptions of portion sizes but unlike other books that show color photographs of portion sizes like "Portion Savvy" or take it a bit further and show how you can eat more of this than that like Shapiro's "Picture Perfect Weight Loss" Ms. Young's book has just a few black and white illustrations. A big mistake in a book demonstrating portion sizes.

Yes folks are supersizing their food, but I think most people have been made clearly aware of this. Pointing it out and telling people to count their portions daily is not new. Weight Watchers employed this method years ago before they switched to the point system.

Naturally you can lose weight watching your portions and making them smaller, as you are cutting calories. However, this information is not new and has been presented better in other books.

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.