I don't know what William Grimes' problem is with 3 veg and two fruit a
day.

>The typical American dinner is an entr=E9e with a starch and a
vegetable, preceded
>in some cases by a salad or soup and followed with dessert.

>For Asians, it's quite normal to eat multiple vegetable dishes at the
same
>meal (even at breakfast), and to prepare very small quantities of fish
or
>meat with much larger quantities of rice. But Americans rarely eat
multiple
>vegetable dishes except on Thanksgiving. If they are going to triple
their
>vegetable consumption, they'll have to greatly enlarge the vegetable
>portions they do eat, throwing the meal off balance, or else walk
around
>nibbling on carrots and cauliflower florets from a plastic bag.

The salad counts as a veg, and if it's a big salad, probably 2 veg
servings by a nutritionist's measure (paging Cindy?). If you eat fruit
for dessert on a normal day then there's one of your fruit servings.
That leaves another veg and a fruit to parcel out among breakfast,
lunch and snacks. What's so hard about that?

It's true that the calorie counting makes the food options look like a
real drag. I never count calories. I know that if I want to stay at my
ideal weight (which I'm not, believe me, even though I've been in
chemotherapy for 3 months) I have to quit snacking at night, quit
indulging in junk food and all the butter I want, and cut back on
chocolate and chocolate croissants. I have never in my life been able
to deny myself such treats for longer than a few days at a time so for
me, weight control is about moderation. And exercise. Today I put on
some music and danced. Worked up a sweat. Then I'll walk the
neighborhood doing errands, stay out for an hour, come back with two
bags of groceries. The nurse who's following my progress insists that
this adds up to moderate, not light, exercise.

I am getting it, however, that portion control is key. My habit is to
eat enormous portions of pasta, bread etc. I really don't need to. I
can pick at meat, but I love my carbs. I can still have them, but maybe
eating a half loaf of walnut levain bread over the course of a day
isn't conducive to being slender and svelte, not after age 40. (When I
was 34 and had no car, I worked for a culinary school, ate everything I
wanted to including pastries, and was lean as a deer from all the
walking and stair climbing)
The famed French paradox may be due to their small portions.

Leila