The siren song of the diet book

Despite owning (and loving!) my Kobo, I still make time to wander around bookstores and browse through the printed merchandise.  Lately, I've found myself veering towards the health/fitness/weight loss section of the store and checking out the diet books.

I've bought a few in the past and always failed miserably at sticking to any of the plans, partly because of laziness but also because of the impracticality of so many of these books.  But that doesn't make it any less tempting to keep looking for "The One" that will be the answer to all my weight problems.

Though as I look at more and more of them, read reviews, see what people are saying, I'm discovering that the ones that actually have useful, healthy information (i.e. not fads or force you to cut out food groups or only eat 600 calories a day) all seem to espouse the same thing: portion control.

Portion control is where I massively fail and this can be chalked up mostly to my own laziness in not measuring/weighing my food better.  But I'm also finding it difficult to even find a good resource that tells me how big a serving should be.  For some people, saying a serving of chicken should be the size of a deck of cards will work.  For me, not so much.  It's not that I don't know how big a deck of cards is; it's that my brain doesn't work so well with the size visualization.  What I need to find is a resource that gives me weights or volumes of serving sizes.  Really, just give me ounces and cups and I'll be good to go.  I have no problem scooping out my cereal with a measuring cup and topping it with a properly measured serving of skim milk; but saying a "medium-sized" anything is a serving size trips me up every time.  Medium-sized compared to what?  (Big- and small-sized, right?!)  When I don't have a point of reference, I'm useless at figuring out that kind of thing.

So when I find the diet book that just lists the proper portion sizes in an easy-to-measure way, that will be my golden ticket.  And it may already exist and I just need to find it...