In the pursuit of a healthier lifestyle and weight loss, understanding portion sizes and calorie intake is crucial. A food scale is a great solution to help with portion control during your weight loss journey, allowing you to have better control over your calorie consumption, food portions, and nutrient intake. This guide will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively use a food scale for weight loss, covering everything from the benefits and types of scales to practical tips and strategies.
The Importance of Portion Control
Portion control plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy weight. Food scales provide an exact measurement of the food you consume, empowering you to make informed decisions about your diet.
Benefits of Using a Food Scale:
- Accuracy: Food scales allow you to measure ingredients with precision. Smart Food Scales, for example, are designed to provide reliable measurements with measuring increments of 1g/ 1ml/ 0.05oz / 0.1fl.oz. If you want accurate numbers, then a food scale is key.
- Awareness: Using a food scale promotes mindfulness by making you more aware of the quantity of food you are eating. This awareness helps you identify areas where you may be overeating.
- Consistency: Consistency is key to successful weight loss. Smart food scales are equipped with advanced features that enable customized calorie tracking, making it easier to achieve your weight loss goals.
Why Weigh Your Food?
Weighing your food can lead to weight loss, teaching you portion control. Once you start weighing your food, you'll gain a better understanding of how many calories you are really consuming. You may be surprised but those granola cereals you have in the morning actually contain 400-500 calories per bowl…and a small bowl at that. By sticking to a certain amount of calories per day, you'll fall into a healthy-eating pattern without much effort at all.
Imagine creating a budget guaranteed to get you out of debt (IF you stick to it)… and guessing prices. T-shirts range from $2-$100+, depending on where it’s sold-and food is no different. Some apples are 75-85 calories, while others top out at 150+ calories. For this reason, logging an apple’s calories without weighing it is like logging a T-shirt (in your budget) without checking its price. And if you’re going to take the time to plan, look up, and track choices, might as well guarantee progress.
Types of Food Scales
Various types of food scales exist. I don't recommend overspending on a food scale, especially when you're starting out.
Read also: Healthy food access with Highmark Wholecare explained.
Smart Food Scales:
- Food Database Integration: Many smart scales have built-in databases of food items and their corresponding nutritional information.
- Real-Time Tracking: Some smart scales can sync with mobile apps or fitness trackers, providing real-time updates on your calorie intake. One example of a digital food scale with an app connectivity is the RENPHO Smart Nutrition Scales. Gennec App works with Bluetooth 5.0 or above and syncs with Apple Health. A Bluetooth food scale offers more than just calorie tracking. They also provide valuable insights into the nutrient composition of your meals. For instance, smart scales can display the macronutrient (carbohydrates, protein, and fat) and micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) breakdown of your food. The Gennec App features a long list of food items with nutrition facts, including calories, vitamins, and proteins, with the option to customize your food data as necessary.
How to Use a Food Scale Effectively
Based on my weight loss journey, the best way to get the most accurate data is to weigh and log your food before cooking. The state of raw ingredients usually changes when cooked and so does their weight. For example, a boiled potato is heavier than a raw one because it has absorbed liquid. That being said, I recommend that you stay consistent above all else, whether you weight it raw or cooked. That way, you'll always be comparing apples to apples.
Step-by-Step Guide to Using a Food Scale:
- Starting Units: Many scales have a variety of different metrics they can weigh food in. The most common ones tend to be grams (g), ounces (oz), and milliliters (mL). Of these three, you should measure your food in grams. I recommend grams over ounces because grams are a more precise unit, and food nutrition labels almost always include the weight of the portion in grams. As for milliliters, they’re like apples and oranges when compared to grams. This is because milliliters measure volume (e.g. liquids), while grams measure mass (e.g. solid foods). So if scales can’t actually measure milliliters, why are they included? The reason is that most scales assume that 1mL equals 1g. With water, this is true. However, this does not necessarily apply to other liquids. Denser liquids such as syrups and dressings can weigh more than 1g per mL, skewing the results. When dealing with liquids, they should actually be measured with things such as cups and spoons. In short, it’s a matter of using the right tool for the job.
- How to Weigh: The most important part of the weighing process is taring the scale. Taring is simply the act of removing the weight of the container from your measurement. This is also known as “zeroing” your scale. Place the bowl, dish, spoon, etc. on the scale. The reading should return to zero again. When done, remove everything and hit tare again to bring the reading back to zero. Repeat for each food you wish to measure. If it’s raw (like uncooked beef): put a bowl on the scale before turning it on. If it’s “loose” (like peanut butter or olive oil): put the container on the scale, take the lid off, and turn it on. Then, scoop the desired portion out.
- Logging Food: Once you have the weight value for your foods, you will want to log them into a food tracking app. These apps will automatically take the info from a nutritional label and scale it appropriately to your amount of food. This saves a lot of headache in terms of crunching numbers by hand. These apps will also show you how many calories and macros you have left for the day, so they’re certainly useful for more than one reason. Fortunately, MyFitnessPal allows you to log every ingredient of a recipe (and their respective weights), and does the math for you (as long as you determine servings in advance).
- Recipe Analysis: Smart scales can analyze and provide nutritional information for your recipe, giving you a comprehensive understanding of the meal's calorie content and nutrient profile.
Integrating a Food Scale into Your Weight Loss Plan
Portion control is crucial for healthy weight loss, and smart food scales excel in this aspect. Smart scales can guide you in achieving accurate serving sizes by displaying weight-based portions. Digital kitchen scales simplify meal planning and analysis, empowering you to make healthier choices.
Practical Applications:
- Meal Prepping: Use your smart scale to portion out meals and snacks in advance.
- Recipe Modification: By weighing ingredients on a smart scale, you can easily modify recipes to align with your weight loss goals and help ensure your daily nutrient intake.
- Recipe Analysis: Smart scales can analyze and provide nutritional information for your recipe, giving you a comprehensive understanding of the meal's calorie content and nutrient profile.
Choosing the Right Food Scale
There is a large variety of different food scales available for purchase. They are occasionally sold in stores, but you’ll probably have an easier time by ordering online. For your intents and purposes, most food scales will do the trick, so don’t over think it.
Factors to Consider When Picking a Food Scale:
- Cost: You shouldn’t have to drop too much money on a scale. Most of the common ones are about 10-20 USD, and even cheaper when bought on sale. The price is usually driven higher when the scale has additional built in features, such as different measurement units, digital displays, and other bells and whistles.
- Features: You should generally keep these simple as well. The only mandatory feature you need on a scale is the ability to weigh in grams. Many of the other features offered from scales are generally unnecessary or even inaccurate. If you do want to look at other factors, consider things like a plugged in vs. battery operated scale, how clear the display is to read, and other user reviews.
- Accuracy and Precision: These two metrics determine how effective your scale will be in assisting you with your goals. While the two terms are commonly interchanged, they actually refer to two different things. Accuracy refers to how close the scale’s readings are to the food’s true weight. Precision can be thought of as consistency. Additionally, you want a scale that can take relatively minute measurements. The bare minimum here is weighing things in whole grams, but many scales will go more precise, giving decimals to the weight as well.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
Sometimes, the MyFitnessPal entry’s unit is “preset”-meaning teaspoons, tablespoons, and other non-weight units (like “scoops” and “servings”) are the only options (when you tap “Serving Size”). When this happens, find a different entry, or see if the label lists weight next to the serving size [ex. If it’s raw (like uncooked beef): put a bowl on the scale before turning it on. If it’s “loose” (like peanut butter or olive oil): put the container on the scale, take the lid off, and turn it on. Then, scoop the desired portion out. When this comes up, search what you’re eating and look for the “middle ground” entry. Pick 950 calories. Then, add ~20% as an “I didn’t weigh it” buffer. In this case, you’d log 1,140 calories.
Real-Life Example
Easter realized he previously didn’t have an accurate understanding of the portion sizes he was eating, especially when it came to calorie-dense foods.
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“I thought I was eating like 2,600 or 2,700 calories [a day], and it was a lot more than that,” he explains. Studios“A lot of times we make assumptions. For example, if I were to just put banana - generic banana - in a calorie counting app, [the results] could have been more than I actually ate, it could have been less than I actually ate,” says Easter. “Same with nuts. If I took a handful of nuts and I throw them in the shake I could potentially be off by more than 100 calories depending on how many I thought that was.”
He said weighing his food helped him see that the snacks he ate between meals were adding unnecessary calories too.
“When you have to weigh everything, you realize that all adds up, and some days it was as much as 500 calories for me,” he says. “That’s enough to really move a dial in terms of weight gain or weight loss.”
Maintaining a Balanced Approach
Using a food scale is just one aspect of a comprehensive weight loss plan, as it helps make sure that your daily intake stays within the healthy range. Ultimately, it’s important to always prioritize nutritious foods that are tend to be lower in calories and higher in essential nutrients, such as fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains. Besides balanced diet and mindful eating, remember as well to complement your efforts with regular exercise and other healthy lifestyle practices.
Fad diets will have you believe that to lose weight you need to cut out certain food groups, macronutrients like carbs, or just “eat clean” (whatever that means). But research consistently shows that weight loss lives and dies with simply burning more energy than you’re consuming. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what you eat so long as you’re eating less energy than you burn, says Kashey. If you keep your calories below threshold, you could technically lose weight on a diet of Skittles, pizza, and Big Macs and still lose weight. (Would it be healthy, though? Definitely not.) The key, as with all diets, is moderation. Those foods won’t fill you up, and they pack in more calories. Foods we consider healthy-vegetables, fruits, lean meats-are filling but contain fewer calories compared to processed foods.
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