Pantry Raid: Getting portions under control

What is a portion size to Elizabeth and Tim McCreary? It could be eating an entire box of macaroni and cheese with hot dogs mixed in or sharing a bowl of guacamole made with six avocados.

“Sometimes we’ll have five to six tacos each,” Elizabeth McCreary says. “It’s so unhealthy.”

Like many people, the McCrearys, who live in Corona, have a tough time figuring out how much to eat at meals and snacks so they don’t blow their calorie budgets. Faced with little time (he’s a network engineer and she’s a managing paralegal) and scant nutritional knowledge, they need help navigating grocery store aisles so they can prepare healthful meals that are an appropriate size.

Portions aren’t their only nutritional concern. Elizabeth, 26, is gluten intolerant and suffers digestive problems after eating foods made with wheat, rye and barley. She’s also sensitive to some foods that are heavy on dairy, a condition often linked with gluten intolerance. Although she’s never been diagnosed with celiac disease (a condition in which the immune system reacts to gluten by damaging the small intestine), when she adopted a gluten-free diet three years ago her symptoms such as gas pains and headaches disappeared.

Tim, 28, has no problems with gluten. He eats some of Elizabeth’s gluten-free foods but also has his own stash of wheat-based bread and cereal.

The McCrearys, who married last year, both would like to lose weight. He’s 5-foot-10 and weighs 238 pounds but would like to get down to 210. She describes herself as a size 20 and aims to become a 12 or 14. However, their attempts to slim down are often derailed by big appetites and tempting, easy-to-prepare foods.

For help, they invited Irvine-based dietitian Lisa Gibson to their home on a recent weekday evening. She opens the couple’s refrigerator and immediately spies one obvious stumbling block to their goals: a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables.

“There’s an apple in there, right behind the salsa,” Tim says. “We do buy produce, but we’ll use it only for that meal.”

“Or it will go bad,” Elizabeth adds. She says that they don’t know how to cook some varieties, and the recipes they do know are often too time-consuming.

“We’re a slave to convenience,” Tim says.

The refrigerator contains some healthful items, including lean, skinless chicken breasts and low-fat milk. But there’s also a 5-pound bag of shredded cheese and almond milk. Gibson isn’t keen on the almond milk; it has only one gram of protein per cup. In the freezer is a bag of unsweetened berries — a good item, but fresh is better when it’s in season.

Gibson uses the almond milk carton to give a quick tutorial on how to read nutrition labels, pointing out the vitamins and minerals included in a serving.

“I’ve never paid attention to the nutritional value of anything,” Elizabeth says. But she has become savvy in the ways of being gluten-free — the pantry contains gluten-free pasta, baking mixes, cookies and crackers, and she checks ingredient lists for items such as modified food starch and monosodium glutamate that could trigger her sensitivity.

Many people have jumped on the gluten-free bandwagon even if they’re not sensitive to the protein, but Gibson cautions that not all gluten-free foods are healthful.

“It’s not necessarily a healthier diet,” she says. “It can be — there are a lot of naturally gluten-free foods, like quinoa, that are good, and you can cut out a lot of processed foods. But if you’re trying to mimic those breads and pastas, that’s not always better.” Many of those products, she says, use ingredients that contain little fiber.

One of the go-to meals in the McCreary household, Elizabeth says, is a pile of chips with cheese and garlic salt. Gibson finds corn tortillas in the cupboard and suggests baking them instead of using fried chips, then cutting back on the cheese and adding refried beans, which are low in fat, high in fiber and already in their pantry.

Instead of Elizabeth and Tim each consuming a box of mac and cheese, they could split one, Gibson says. In place of the hot dogs, she suggests they serve a large salad, which will add vitamins and fiber and help them feel full.

Other acceptable foods in the pantry include canned tuna, a bag of prepared quinoa and some brown rice, another whole grain that’s gluten-free.

Almonds are in there too, a favorite snack of Tim’s. He says he eats about one or two cups a day — far more than the recommended one-ounce serving size, which amounts to 20 to 25 nuts. Nuts contain monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are good fats — but still fat.

A look at their four-day food diary reveals fairly good habits at breakfast and lunch. But they tend to make worse choices with dinner, snacks and meals in restaurants, which are occasionally accompanied by alcohol. “Their meals are calorie-dense, not nutrient-dense,” Gibson says.

For breakfast, Elizabeth typically has orange juice blended with protein powder or a protein bar, and Tim has cereal with milk and juice. For lunch, Elizabeth has a small salad with chicken and low-fat dressing while Tim eats a meat-and-cheese sandwich with some almonds and fruit or a cookie. He also consumes a number of energy drinks during the day, which prompts Gibson to caution him to watch his caffeine and sugar intake.

At dinner, all bets are off. At home they may chow down on the chips and cheese combination, possibly adding some chicken sausages. At a local chain restaurant Elizabeth had half of a gluten-free pizza with cheese, onion, artichoke and sausage, a wedge salad with dressing and two strawberry lemonades. For dessert, she indulged in a rich gluten-free cookie with ice cream. The meal probably contained more calories than she should have in an entire day.

Liquid calories can add up quickly, Gibson says, and smoothies leave you hungry soon after — not a good bet if it’s replacing a meal.

After checking out the pantry, everyone heads to a local Vons, where the first stop is the produce section. Gibson finds fresh blueberries at a good price, and Elizabeth adds them to her cart. “You just eat these plain?” she asks, and Gibson nods.

As the couple has little time to cook, Gibson suggests buying bagged, pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables such as broccoli, snow peas and carrots. Reading the nutrition label on a bag of mixed lettuce, she points out that two cups contain about 20 calories and provide 80% of the recommended daily requirement of vitamin A. Into the cart go the lettuce, a red pepper, baby carrots, artichokes, Brussels sprouts, red and sweet potatoes and bananas.

Gibson plucks a small piece of fresh ginger from a basket and shows it to Elizabeth, who has never seen the root before. “It’s great in stir-frys,” she says. The best news of all? Portion size doesn’t matter when it comes to fresh vegetables, as long as they’re not slathered with melted cheese or butter.

At the meat counter, Gibson recommends lean ground turkey and even a pork tenderloin, the latter of which comes in at 120 calories and 2.5 grams of saturated fat for a 4-ounce portion. In the dairy section, Gibson urges Elizabeth to try lactose-free cow’s milk — although soy milk contains decent amounts of protein and calcium, opting for fewer processed foods whenever possible is a good idea. At the cheese case, crumbled blue cheese is chosen over the large bag of shredded cheddar; this will be used in a low-fat salad dressing made with nonfat Greek yogurt. Tim and Elizabeth also put a pack of low-fat string cheese in their cart — one stick has 80 calories and 3.5 grams of saturated fat.

For a sweet treat, Elizabeth opts for Ghirardelli 72% cacao dark chocolate in individually wrapped pieces, which meets with Gibson’s approval. One small square has 67 calories and about 3 grams of saturated fat.

Back at the house, Gibson shows the couple how to prepare roasted vegetables, a tasty alternative to steaming them. She places quartered red potatoes and Brussels sprouts in a roasting pan, drizzles them with olive oil and adds salt and pepper before putting them in the oven for about 30 minutes. She prepares the salad dressing and the couple tries it with some baby carrots. The verdict? Both are delicious.

The McCrearys seem committed to making changes, but Gibson says that adopting new healthful habits isn’t just about paying lip service. “You have to make it more specific,” she says: “ ‘I will put fruit on my cereal, and I will take carrots with me to lunch and I’ll make sure I have a vegetable with every dinner.’ ”

Would you like to be considered for our next Pantry Raid? If you’re in the Los Angeles area, send an email describing your dietary habits to jeannine.stein@latimes.com.