finally got a food scale and found out...

i'm eating less than i thought i was.  not a lot less - nothing to be concerned about.  but what i thought was a serving (56g) of cereal is only 40g, and the handful of egg noodles that i thought was 200 calories is only about 150.  crazy, hey?

That's good! Considering most of us over estimate instead of under! I tend to TRY to over estimate to be on the safe side....hmmm, now I'm curious! LOL

yeah, vicki, i expected that, is anything, i was overestimating by a little.  oh well - i'm happy!

hahaha that happened to me too!!

Especially with meat, like steak and chicken. I used to think of a 'card deck.' but I was only eating half a serving of meat. Anyways it was a GREAT feeling due to the fact that I could eat twice as much with same amount of calories!

yay scales!

something that always confused me is that ppl will say that when they weigh cereal with a scale it comes out to less than an actual cup, as in using a measuring cup.  is that true?

Scales are fantastic.  When I was actively counting (which I should be doing again) I used my scale for everything.  They are also great for baking.  I think all recipes should have ingredients by weight (grams, of course)!

I was eating less than I thought too, especially with soup. The label indicates 2 servings per can, but when I weigh it out I get less than a serving and a half. 

I love my food scale, but my roommate shows concern when she sees me using it and I feel like I'm being obsessive. Ag. Ah well, I need portion training and the scale is my guide.

ftf, part of my rationalization for buying it was that it would be good when i was "really" cooking.  i don't know what that means.  in my mind, i think i was becoming a caterer or something.  but i have a sneaking suspicion that chefs who work on a large scale only use weight, and that real chefs would prefer to write cookbooks that way.

skook, if you know you're healthy, who cares what your roomie thinks?

agru, like i said, what i thought was one serving (1 cup) of kashi golean crunch turned out to be significantly less than a serving.  but measuring dry foods by volume is hit and miss, so i dunno.

Original Post by pgeorgian:

ftf, part of my rationalization for buying it was that it would be good when i was "really" cooking.  i don't know what that means.  in my mind, i think i was becoming a caterer or something.  but i have a sneaking suspicion that chefs who work on a large scale only use weight, and that real chefs would prefer to write cookbooks that way

I bought an electronic scale for cooking too (those french and russian cookbooks don't like to use cups for some reason ) - and it was an eye opener when I tried counting calories.  :) I think everyone should get them, if not for cooking, at least for knowing what their favorite food really weighs and what that translates into.   

I was gonna mention that if you use your scale a lot while making different things, buy some wax paper inserts to put on the scale.  Measure, dump, move on.  It keeps the scale a lot cleaner and makes clean up easy.  I have used the same insert for several dry items first, and then moved to the wet - one whole recipe, one insert.  Just thought I would share.  You want to be careful to not cross containmate - and if you have vegetarians who care about shared surfaces, most of them are okay with using these things. 

My scale has this awesome setting called "tare". What is does is zero it our after I put a bowl/plate/whatever on it...so I can put the food in the bowl and not worry about having to wipe the scale constantly. ALso I can weigh multiple things into the same bowl, just zeroing it out after each addition to get the weight of the new item. So cool.

I used to have a crappy old dial scale, how analogue. I got a digital one for my b-day and it rocks!! I was quite surprised at weights of things too...cheese I tended to WAY underestimate, but meat I tended to overestimate, so I guess it all evened out.

So now I can trust my scale...what I don't trust is the nutritional info provided on packages. Sometimes they are wrong. And....if they give the portion as, say, "1 cup (125g)", and it turns out that 1C and 125g are not the same thing...how do we know which measurement the nutritional info is being provided for? Is it always better to trust the weight? Hmm. I know it won't make a huge difference one way or the other, I am just a bit of an accuracy freak. Occupational hazard.

Original Post by victoriagirl:

My scale has this awesome setting called "tare". What is does is zero it our after I put a bowl/plate/whatever on it...so I can put the food in the bowl and not worry about having to wipe the scale constantly. ALso I can weigh multiple things into the same bowl, just zeroing it out after each addition to get the weight of the new item. So cool.

Mine too! I looooooooooooove my scale.