YOU CAN AVOID the pointless drudgery of weighing everything you eat by comparing portions to common household objects.

Cheese: One ping-pong ball

Sauerkraut: Half a golf club

Water: A small fax machine

Spinach: The carburetor of a 1934 DeSoto Airflow

Butter: One lump of butter

Beef: 1/482 of a cow

Pasta (cooked): A stapler

Fruit Jelly: One of the fruit from which it is made, minus a gross of “falcon” steel pens

Dinner Roll: One dinner roll

Fish: One volume of the 1834 edition of Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature

Potato: One hamburger