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So you want to lose fat: Weighing your food

First, an admission.

Weighing food and logging what you eat is about as fun as it sounds. There are things you can do to make the process less annoying, but it’s still a lot of logging.

The good news: You probably don’t have to log weighed food forever (or at least until you reach your target weight). You can learn a lot of useful things by weighing things for only one or two weeks worth of meals.

What I learned from weighing my food

Getting accurate amounts for what I was eating helped me figure out a lot of things I wouldn’t have known otherwise:

It’s nice to put walnuts on a salad, but I accidentally shook the bag a little too hard and added roughly 400 calories to the salad (two Quest bars worth of calories). I realized I didn’t like walnuts in my salad all that much, especially if they were going to require calibration and careful measuring out.
If you’re eating 85/15 ground beef, you’re not going to be able to easily hit 1g of protein per pound of lean body mass while on a cut unless you also add some chicken or another lean meat to your daily intake.
Whole eggs’ protein/fat ratios won’t help increase your protein/fat ratio if your main protein is 85/15 ground beef. You want to eat yolks (they have great micronutrients in them), so you don’t want to eat just egg-white scrambles. On the other hand, making five-white-two-yolk scrambles is an annoyance and it’s not like you’re going to be able to make (and eat) lemon curd with all the extra yolks you’re not eating.

What kind of scale(s) to buy

You will want, at a bare minimum, a scale that’s accurate to one gram. Scales like this tend to have a maximum capacity of five kilograms, meaning they can’t always handle the weight of large glass bowls (or Pyrex containers).

If you get into the whole “weigh your food when you’re cooking” thing, you might also want a scale that’s accurate to .001 gram. However, a scale like this will only help you measure small amounts, like amounts smaller than a tablespoon. Still, I much prefer measuring spices by the gram instead of by the fractional teaspoon; have you ever tried to grate pepper into something that holds only a quarter-teaspoon?

Have a camera handy

When I’m logging weights of foods I’m adding to a bowl, the last thing I want to do is break my flow and edit an Excel file or add an ingredient to Cronometer. What I end up doing to log weights is:

1. Tare the scale with the (partially filled) bowl on it

2. Add as much ingredient as I think is right

3. Put the ingredient’s container next to the scale

4. Take a picture of the scale readout with the container clearly visible

This gives me a handy picture log that I can use as a reference when I’m writing up the de-facto recipe for, say, a salad I’m having.

Useful external resources

Cronometer

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