Whether your goal is to build muscle, lose fat, maintain your weight or just lose weight in general, accurately tracking your macros is key. One of the biggest tips I can teach a beginner is how to weigh food!
You’d be surprised how different a serving measured in grams is compared to a serving measured with a measuring cup.
For example, take dry pancake mix. A true serving of Kodiak Cakes is 53 grams. The nutrition label estimates that to be about a 1/2 cup. The problem is the amount of dry pancake mix you pack in your measuring cup will be different every time. Meaning sometimes you are consuming more calories and others less.
This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if you do this for every meal it adds up and could be the reason you aren’t hitting your goals.
Contrarily, 53 grams will be the same amount of pancake mix every time. 53 grams will always be 1 serving. I’ve had a half cup of kodiak cake mix weigh out to be 1 serving and I’ve also had it be as much as 1 1/2 servings other times. That’s a difference of 95 calories.
Sure that may not make a big difference if you only do that once, BUT if you measure inaccurately several times a day you could be going over your calories by as much as 1 or 500 calories a day.
Bottom line: If you’re not using a food scale, you’re not hitting your macros.
If you want to be successful, invest in a food scale. They’re not very expensive, but they are so essential.
What types of food to weigh:
You want to weigh almost everything. This includes protein powder, pancake mix, flour, sugar, ketchup, rotisserie chicken, drumsticks, ribs, tortilla chips, cheese, cereal, fruit, etc.
The exception: you do not weigh liquids, while most food scales do have a fluid ounce & mL function, I would say 99% of people do not use it.
The general consensus is that it is not accurate. Instead, just use a measuring cup that measures in Oz or a normal measuring cup if you know how to convert cups to ounces.
“Wet” food that you do weigh: ketchup, honey, any nut butter, sauces, dressings, basically if the serving size on the nutrition label is listed in grams, you should weigh it, if it’s listed in Oz or mL you should measure it.
Prepackaged foods: When it comes to prepackaged foods, it’s up to you. There are a lot of differing opinions on this. I personally don’t like to be overly “strict” on my macro counting and will just trust the label on any prepackaged single serving foods.
Do you weigh before or after cooking?
It is more accurate to weigh meats & veggies raw. However, it really just depends on how you’re logging your food.
Using the My TransPhormation Starts Today App you have food entries for both raw and cooked foods.
So if you forgot to weigh your chicken before you cooked it, just make sure you’re logging the cooked weight as “cooked chicken.”
It also has specific entries for the way you cooked your food as well (steamed, grilled, etc.) so be sure to choose the right one.
Veggies are the same deal. Track them as raw if you can or steamed if they were steamed before you weighed them, etc.
What if I’m cooking for my family?
Okay, let’s start with something simple like rice.
You need to make 4 servings of rice. Using a food scale, weigh out 4 servings of rice (in grams) BEFORE you cook it. Next, cook it as you normally would. Weigh the cooked rice and divide that by 4. You now know how many grams are in a single serving of cooked rice so you can dish out the correct portion size for yourself.
But, not everything is as simple as rice.
It’s a little tricky to be super accurate when making large batches of food with multiple ingredients. The best case scenario is that you cook all ingredients separately and dish them out on your plate one by one. But, this isn’t always possible.
Let’s say you’re making something like Chili.
First, do what you did with the rice and weigh out all the ingredients for the recipe before they are cooked.
Now create a recipe in My TransPhormation Starts Today App and add in all the ingredients. When your meal is done, weigh the entire thing as a whole. To do this just place a big empty container on your food scale, zero it out and then pour in your meal.
You can then divide it up and add it into your app per serving.
Reverse weighing your food:
Does anyone else eat things straight out of the container? I do!
I used to do this all the time with nut butter!
In order to accurately track every random spoonful you eat, you need to reverse weigh your food.
This means put the container directly onto the food scale and zero it out by pressing the “tare” button.
Next, eat however many spoonfuls you’d like and watch your scale go into the negative. Just convert that negative number into a positive and you now know how much you ate. No more excuses for not tracking small bites and licks.
Benefits of weighing your food:
- Hit your macros and break through diet plateaus. (BIGGEST BENEFIT)
- Less dishes. You are not dirtying any measuring cups, etc when you weigh your food. I just pour directly into the bowl on the food scale until I hit the number of grams I’m aiming for. Same goes for shakes. I just put the blender directly onto the food scale, and add ingredients, zero-ing out the scale after every new ingredient.
- No variation when making the same recipe. Ever make a recipe and it turns out different every time? That’s usually due to human error when measuring. You won’t have that problem anymore.