For Good Measure

My coworker asked me the other day "How do you know what a serving size looks like?" I told her "The best way really is to get a food scale." Her response: "Only fatties have food scales." How does that foot taste, cuz I have a food scale and I use it daily!

It's tough to eyeball a serving size and gauge whether it's 1 serving, 2 servings, etc, especially since our portions are so greatly mutated in this day and age. You've heard it before: some restaurants serve single dinners that can feed up to 3 people, dinner plates got bigger, everything is supersized...blah blah. The only way to educate yourself on how much you should be eating per serving is to actually take the time to measure it out. I don't know about you but when I was doing Weight Watchers, the leader tried to convince me that estimating 3 oz of chicken was easy. "It looks like a deck of cards," she'd say. Well, what kind of cards are we talking about? Uno cards or bicycle cards (of course this was obvious but if we went with the 1st option, I'd get to eat a lot more. UNO!!!).

I didn't really grasp what a serving looked like until I actually measured it out. If you have ever measured out a cup of something like cereal and then weighed that cup on a food scale and compared it to the label, you'd see the numbers do not mesh. Sometimes a cup can actually be a lot more than the suggested weight. I read somewhere that it has to do with how the pieces actually fit in the cup; if your dog stomped on the box after you got it home from the store, it'll take a lot more tiny broken pieces to fill that cup than bigger ones. Also, in the case of ice cream, the more stuff you have in it (nuts, cookies, fudge), the more it weighs. A cup of Fudge Tracks ice cream with 3 tiny PB cups would obviously have less calories than a cup of the same ice cream with 10 PB cups, so measuring by weight is the better choice here (side note...ever notice how all the ice cream mix-ins are at the top of the container and as you get to the bottom, there is NOTHING?! I have a huge gripe with that).

I ain't gonna lie: when I first started weighing my food, I was not a happy camper. I went from eating my ice cream out of a cereal bowl to using a soy sauce dish we use for sushi. My ANPB barely covers my bread. A pasta dinner consists of maybe 4 forkfulls of noodles. But I use my scale diligently for each and every meal and snack. The more tools I learn to use through this journey, the more likely I am to reach my goal...even if it means eating my dinner off of a salad plate.