Linda Gassenheimer

The Portion Plan: How to Eat the Foods You Love and Still Lose Weight is, as the name suggests, a diet book. As the title also suggests, it focuses primarily on the foods you eat. There is short section on the need for exercise, but the bulk of the book talks about food. The book has a meal plan at the end. The rest of the book is divided into sections on the major food groups (e.g., meats, grains, etc). Within each group, it talks about individual foods (e.g., beef, chicken). For each, it presents the following information: How much should I eat? Choices (e.g., chicken breast v. liver) to enjoy, savor, or avoid? Healthy ways to enjoy.

What I liked:
The book does include visual clues to approximate portion sizes (e.g., palm of your hand, fist). These are not new ideas, but they are helpful.

The consistency of the layout of each section was helpful.

What I did not like:

Any diet book that uses large full color pictures of food is distracting from its own purpose. One of the fundamental techniques of eating better can be to remove food reminders from your environment. This book does the complete opposite presenting these tempting visuals on every page.… (mehr)