Get Fit Lab - For Your Health and Fitness

Diet Plan Type: Controlling Portion Size
Best for: Long term weight loss and to maintain weight loss

No calorie counting. No forbidden foods. No weighing food. Sensible eating and learning how to “smartsize” your portions are the key to finding the right balance for healthy eating.

How does the Portion Teller diet plan work?

Dr. Young points to an example of nutritionists not being able to accurately guess the calorie or fat content of several restaurant meals. Given the difficulty in accurately counting, her portion teller approach uses visual guides designed to teach dieters how to understand the correct portion size of foods.

Depending on a dieter’s portion personality – the mindless muncher, the breakfast hater, the volume eater, the special occasion victim – Young has devised formulas for each type to help dieters find the right balance of their daily food servings. Dieters will be able to eat out, eat in and even cheat, without overeating.

Learning a simple system of visuals – a deck of cards, a baseball, your own hand – helps dieters gauge portion size. Initially a food diary is used until dieters learn how to size up their favourite foods with the visuals. Dieters can track and chart their diet course by employing line drawings, charts, The Portion Teller Plan pyramid, and portion diaries.

Her understanding of the underlying reasons for bad eating habits has also lead her to develop a cheat’s guide, a survival guide for eating out and daily meal plans.

Successful weight loss using this plan comes from applying Dr Young’s real-life principles. She believes deprivation, calorie counting or eliminating foods doesn’t work.

What food can I eat?

Instead of giving up your favourite foods, nutritionist, Lisa Young, believes the answer to losing weight is portion size.

How people eat depends on their portion personality. For instance, a Special Occasion Victim finds it hard to resist a cake at an office party and a Volume Eater needs their plate to be full. Her nutrition counselling experience has led her to develop techniques to help each type successfully overcome their food weakness.

Is it a Healthy Diet?

Dr. Lisa Young is a nutritionist and known by millions as the portion control expert in the film Super Size Me. The principles in the Portion Teller diet follow healthy eating guidelines and will help dieters make healthy choices and overcome potential sources of bad eating habits.

Top Marks

• Simple visuals are easy to learn and employ in different situations.
• Focuses on making healthy choices and limiting food intake to the correct daily amounts.
• Recommended daily intake is based on activity level.

Potential Problems

• Can be overly simplistic.
• Not all concepts are fully explained. For instance, what activity level would be considered “extremely active”?

Will I lose weight?

Dieters will likely need to eat less than their current portion size. Provided you follow the principles of eating the correct portions according to the recommended amount for your activity level then you should be able to lose weight on this diet plan.

Our Rating:

How to Get Started

Begin following the Portion Teller Diet with these resources:

Disclaimer: The “typical” visitor will not change their behavior as a result of reading or purchasing any products. Resulting in no weight loss. A few may read the material and not act on it. And a small minority will read and follow the program. This small minority actually has a chance of losing weight. Be different. Take action.