It takes more than one...

Plan, that is. Before I joined hubby in his Weight Watchers endeavor, I spent six months writing a series of Nutrition and Fitness books for Teacher Created Resources. In the process of researching and writing those books, I spent quite a bit of time on a government web site, Choose My Plate (listed under "Tidbits"). Within the site there are suggestions for number of servings of each food group per day. These have changed slightly from the former "food pyramid" with an increased emphasis on fruits and vegetables. I decided to try to follow the daily equivalents for the calorie range I wanted. Combined with tips on visualizing portion size, the guidelines gave me a general plan to follow, without a lot of measuring or weighing. Bearing in mind that I'm not very tall, so my nutritional needs fall at the lower end of the scale for adults, the guide I followed was this: Grains: 4 to 5 one ounce equivalents, Vegetable: 1 1/2 cups, Fruit: 1 1/2 cups, Milk: 2 cups (or 2 servings), Protein: 3 to 4 one ounce equivalents. Those one ounce equivalents are the key. For example, a "serving" of pasta is 2 ounces. So to have pasta at dinner is half of my total grain servings for the day. If I have a muffin for breakfast or lunch, that's the other half. Or, I could have 1 ounce cereal (that part I do have to measure) for breakfast and 1 slice bread (half sandwich) for lunch. These general guidelines confirmed something I had suspected: some of our (collective, in general) problems might not arise specifically from wheat as much as from the total amount of grain. If we look around, we'll find people advocating no grain, no meat, no preservatives. I can tell you this: we need food to live. A common sense approach seems best. As Mom says, "all things in moderation." That said, I'll keep looking for things that have crunch :-) And I do steer clear of preservatives -- I'll live just as long (or longer!) without them.