K, you posted about my favorite topic, which is being heart healthy and portion control.

I am not tiny. I am 5'9" and I have about 40-50 pounds of too much body fat. I've been working on my weight loss for many years, and I lost quite a bit of weight already, slowly, over time, with permanent behavior changes. Every day my focus is portion control and choosing my foods carefully, and so I've noticed the same things you have.

Regarding the huge portions in restaurants - it is unbelievable. Not only that, it seems to me that restaurants are looking for ways to make food more fattening. For example, a local restaurant chain added hash browns filled with different cheeses and sour cream to their menu. Menu items that used to have ordinary hash browns, maybe 150 to 300 calories, now have hash browns that are probably around 1500-2500 calories because there are two layers of potatoes, not just the one, and between the layers are gobs of cheese and sour cream. And I look around, and people are eating it!

Then how about sitting down and watching t.v. and up pops the fast food commercials. I refuse to eat at fast food restaurants because they are so unhealthy; indeed I've eaten at fast food restaurants fewer than one dozen times in my life and I am 52. I think the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial is the worse. The commercial shows the mother bringing home fried chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, cole slaw and biscuits and putting it down on the dining room table and announcing it is dinner time. What mother in her right mind would feed her family that high-fat, high-sodium, low-nutrition, high-calorie food? Yet Americans see those commericals on t.v. and they think it is how everyone eats, and so children grow up fat. Not only that, young children now have hypertension and high cholesterol, meaning before too much longer they will be diabetics with heart disease. How sad is that?

I can go on and on. This is my favorite topic. But I better shut up before I offend a whole bunch of people.

Darcy