Crayon Keeper

What a great gift idea!

Portion Size - Now vs. Then

I recently went to the movies with a friend/neighbor and purchased a medium soda for the film. When the lady working the counter handed me my drink I wanted to fall out. Are you serious? This drink was enormous. No ONE person needed to be drinking this whole drink. So it has started me on my search for how much size of items we commonly consume. This is what I found:

Because portions are now so large, it’s hard to understand what a “serving size” is supposed to be. Today’s bagel counts for three servings of bread, but many of us would consider it one serving.



















Those extra 350 calories, if eaten a two times a month, would put on two extra pounds a year, or forty pounds in the next two decades.

While the 12-ounce can used to be the most common soda option, many stores now carry only the 20-ounce plastic bottle, which contains 2.5 servings of soda. When presented with these larger sizes, humans have a hard time regulating our intake or figuring out what a serving size is supposed to be.

Then Now
333 calories 590 calories
When McDonald’s first started in 1955, its only hamburger weighed around 1.6 ounces; now, the largest hamburger patty weighs 8 ounces, an increase of 500 percent. And while a Big Mac used to be considered big, it’s on the smaller side of many burger options.

We Americans love to get the most bang for our buck. When confronted with a 32-ounce drink for 99 cents versus a 44-ounce drink for ten cents more, the decision is easy. You’d have to be a sucker not to go big. But our ability to get the most out of our dollar doesn’t always serve us well. Value pricing, which gets us a lot more food or drink for just a little increase in price, makes sense from an economic standpoint, but is sabotage from a health standpoint.

What is normal?
Increased portion sizes give us more calories, encourage us to eat more, distort perceptions of appropriate food quantities, and along with sedentary lifestyles, have contributed to our national bulge. Unless you’re trying to gain weight, it might help to reacquaint yourself with serving sizes. The NHLBI tells us that a serving of meat should be the size of a deck of cards while one pancake should be the size of a CD. It’s unlikely that we’ll see a scaling down of food to these sizes anytime soon, so perhaps we should all become familiar with another image: the doggy bag.

For the full article http://http//www.divinecaroline.com/79975/49492-portion-size--vs--now

This just blew me away!

Today my son, Aidan, told me ....

Chocolate makes your tummy hurt.

I cant have chocolate mommy. I dont want my tummy to hurt.

I mean are you serious. Coming from a kid. Love it.

Cowboys fan

Holy geez! I want this. I never thought I would be a football fan..but now that I am, I must have a shirt to support my team. Adding this to the Christmas wish list.

I think Santa has found one of his items he will be delivering to this house....as much as the boys love to vacuum with my dyson it is time they have one of their own. This way they cant break mine.

Oh Honey!

Every wonder why as a PARENT you could never give your child honey until they were over the age of 1...well I have the answer.

Tonight in my Microbiology class (which I dont recommend taking if you are a clean freak like me) I learned the answer.

Honey is full of a bacteria called...

Clostridium botulinum

That is botulism. Infants do not have the necessary immune response to fight off this bacteria in their digestive tract.

seriously

Oh how big my little boy is getting. On Wednesday, Andrea and I were getting the boys ready to take to daycare so that us ladies could go to class. It was crazy around here as usual at the time. I was especially upset because I kept asking them to get their shoes on so that we could go. Instead of getting his shoes on, what do I find?

Mason, in the kitchen, in the pantry with the doritos bag open and himself a ziploc bag. My son was putting a snack together for himself to take in the car.

I mean are you serious. This kid is just too smart. Then they swithed and Aidan decided he needed a snack if Mason had one so he got himself some granola.

What happened to my little boys.