Healthy eating and how to accomplish it in a fast-food crazed America was one of the many topics discussed Monday at the Encore Lecture: “Pursuing the Good Life through Healthy Eating.”

SMU’s dietician Sue Duncan offered multiple ways to counter junk food, binging and malnourishment on campus. Specifically, Duncan spoke about what you should eat – and how much.

“There’s nothing wrong with eating things you like,” Duncan said. “You’re just living life, what’s wrong with that?”

Duncan isn’t a huge supporter of fad diets. Believing them to be mainly useless, she said that eating a well-balanced diet each day is not only healthier, but keeps the body from possibly over-exerting itself as a result of eating only certain types of diet-specific foods.

Duncan’s ideal diet is one that more or less mirrors the basic, elemental diet that is widely accepted by the nation. She encouraged specific items such as eating darker-colored vegetables, substituting certain products such as whole milk and french fries with other items like two percent or skim milk and baked potatoes.

Another big issue that Duncan covered was the amount of portions and serving sizes that Americans eat daily.

“All in all, when we look at the faults of the typical American diet we find that serving sizes are where we go astray most of the time,” she said.

Duncan gave out pamphlets describing the ideal serving portions for most types of foods (for instance, one portion of fish is about three ounces, or in more visual terms, the size of a checkbook) and how to keep track of your daily intake of the five food groups.

While Duncan isn’t an adamant supporter of special dieting, she did give approval to intake-specific diets like Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers, both of which place an emphasis on keeping track not so much on what you eat, but on how much of it you eat every day.