Too much food

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."-Michael Pollan

The quote above comes from Michael Pollan, a popular writer about food and the food industry. He wrote an entire book on this topic, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which is summarized in his New York Times article, Unhappy Meals.
The first and last points are fairly "easy" to follow.

Eat food - by this he means real, natural, food with minimum (or no) artificial ingredients. As Pollan puts it, don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize. Stay close to nature and avoid food that is heavily processed or created in a laboratory.

Mostly plants - eat lots of fruits and vegetables, less meat and grains.

The middle point, Not too much, is "obvious" but not so easy to follow. What is the "right" amount of food to eat? Official portion sizes on products always seem so laughably small. But size does matter. I read one account of the 1/2 plate diet. A woman managed to lose weight by eating only half of every "normal" sized meal and saving the rest for another meal.

There are dietary guidelines for "proper" meal sizes but few of us carry a postal or food scale to measure the ounces of meat, etc, we are about to eat. In lieu of a scale, here are some visual clues to portion sizes:

Meat:
a 1 once sausage is the size of a shotgun shell (54 calories, 5g fat)
or 3 oz of beef = a deck of cards (219 cal, 13g fat)

Mashed Potatoes and most vegetables: 1/2 cup = 1/2 an apple (112 cal, 5g fat)
Just how big an apple? A fresh fruit portion size = 1 cup = a 60 watt light bulb.
The portion size for canned or sliced fruit is 1/2 cup.

Pasta: 1/2 cup cooked = fist sized (99 cal, 1g fat)
Lasagna: 8 oz = two hockey pucks (270 cal, 8g fat)
Bagel: one hockey puck
Pancake: one CD sized
Cornbread: a bar of soap

Soup: 1 cup = baseball (175 cal, 6g fat for chicken-noodle)

Ice Cream: 1/2 cup = tennis ball (143 cal, 7g fat)

Cheese: 1 oz = 4 dice cubed or 1 ping-pong ball
(107 cal, 8g fat for Swiss; 80 cal, 6g fat for mozzarella)

Bottom Line

I tried to find some rule of "thumb" to portion visualization but it's confusing when the same web site uses a tennis ball for 1 cup of pasta and a 1/2 cup of fruit. Seems backwards to me. I'd expect the pasta to have more air space and look bigger. One site says 2 dice for 1 oz of cheese, another says 4 dice. So apply these rules with a grain of salt.

Resources

http://education.wichita.edu/caduceus/examples/servings/household_items.htm

http://education.wichita.edu/caduceus/examples/servings/handy_reminders.htm

http://www.ped.med.utah.edu/pku/pdf/portion.pdf

http://www.myfooddiary.com/Resources/estimating_serving_sizes.asp