A Healthy Kitchen Tool: The Food Scale

So yesterday morning my schedule said run 5 miles, but my legs and my hips let me know they didn’t care what my scheduled said… my only option was yoga.

Now, we all know that I love yoga and I’m so good to sticking to it, not. But, I figured since I was already up I might as well make the most of it and do a full 60 minute class to really get some benefits out of the deal. I did a class called hips and hams from yogadownload.com, which progressed into the splits. Killer, in a good way.

You know those really rare times when you wake up a little early and you think you have all the time in the world to get ready and then you realize you’ve messed around for too long and now you have 10 minutes. No? Just me? Well, thats pretty much what happened yesterday but I still managed to make some green juice.

EVERYONE at my work is sick… the staff and the clients, I am NOT missing one single day of green juice for anything! I think it’s a miracle drug the world has been missing out on, no more pills but green juice for everyone (I say that as I pop two Ibuprofen for my ache and pains.) Breakfast was also veggie packed, I had half an acorn squash (leftover from Tuesday night’s dinner fail) with sun butter, raisins, and granola. I love this breakfast, so easy to throw together and so delicious!

By 12:45 or so I was really hungry and dug into my salad which yesterday was composed of preservative free deli turkey, blackberries, dates and walden farms balsamic vinegar dressing. Plus, I literally had the best pear I have ever eaten in my entire life. I’ve never had that kind of pear before, I just grabbed a bunch randomly at Sprouts one day. It was unexpectedly amazing, sweet with a pop of tartness and crunchy like an apple …but better! I’ll definitely be getting more of those this weekend. I ate my carrots on the beginning of my commute home.

I enjoyed the rest of my drive home chatting away with a good friend, we talked away until we finally both had to go make dinner. I was excited to try this recipe because she had made it before and said it was a big hit!

I added ground turkey to the beginning of the recipe and left out the black beans. I also used 6 small La Tortilla Factory whole wheat tortillas instead of corn tortillas (that is all I had.) The recipe was super easy to make, healthy and incredibly tasty. Who knew butternut squash would taste so good covered in enchilada sauce? Bonus, I got Paul to willingly eat butternut squash… ya it was THAT good. Protein fudge for dessert after all the cleaning up and packing for today was done.

Using a Food Scale

For breakfast the last two mornings I’ve weighed out my sun butter (when I packed it the night before) because I felt like I was getting a little heavy handed with it. Turns out I was right, what looks like one tablespoon to me turns out to be more like two, two and half or even three according to the food scale. Back when I was calorie counting I use to weigh out almost every single piece of food I had and record it. While I’ve stopped calorie counting, I still weigh and measure my food from time to time. Especially when I find that I’m getting a little generous with my portion sizes. I know I’m not alone, its common for people to learn what appropriate portions are and measure them out for a long time. Then somewhere along the way we think “we’ve got it, we don’t need the tools anymore” and we begin “eyeballing it.” Overtime we get more and more generous with our eyeballing estimations.

The difference between 16g (1T) and 32g (2T) of sun butter is about 100 calories, same for the difference between one ounce of cheese and two. While this isn’t a lot for one day, it can add up and help contribute to weight gain over time.

The food scale is such a useful kitchen took because it is much easier and more effective than measuring out food. When you use it, yu don’t have to wash anything extra you just put whatever it is on the food scale and zero it out, then add the food to be measured. It is also more effective than measuring food because numbers don’t lie. A tablespoon on the other hand might lie to you if you aren’t leveling it off. While I love my thirty dollar digital scale, at first I had just a cheap $5 dollar scale that did the trick just as well. So it doesn’t take a huge investment to keep your waist line in check!

Your thoughts? Do you measure your food? How do you keep portion size in check for certain foods? What foods do you think are most important to portion out?

Cheese and Nut Butters are the most difficult for me to portion control.