Food Scales

If you think you’ve gone on any kind of reducing diet, but you don’t own a food scale, you are kidding yourself. You were doing it wrong.

I’ve always weighed portions when I’m counting calories, but I never really worried about it with low-carb diets. Pretty much all low-carb diet books give vegetable and fruit portions in cup measures or as part of a piece of fruit. Just this year I’ve come to the realization that this is *way* off. I never thought it mattered with green vegetables, but surprisingly, it does. I was eating at least twice as much low-carb veggies as I thought I was, so all my carb counts for the day were totally fictional. It adds up over a day, and it really adds up over a week.

I’ve been watching my carbs to maintain a nice weight loss about which I’ve already written. In addition to that, I got more reinforcement from Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival. I have a lot more to say about this book, but for the moment, I’ll cut to the chase about scales. I apparently had *no* idea what “1 cup” of lettuce or dark green leafy greens looks like. How much do you pack the cup, and what constitutes loosely packed anyway? Measuring calories or carbs that way is *nuts* (speaking of which, you really need to weigh those instead of using cup measures!).

All the online calorie counters base their number off those published by the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory. They are all derived off of 100g portions. That’s all the USDA measures — 100g portions. No matter how you look at it, you’re better off weighing your food. In particular, fruit varies tremendously. The apples sold separately in the supermarket – the ones where you get to pick out each one yourself – have about 110 calories, but most people would record that as a “medium apple.” Weigh it – it’s more like extra-large. The smaller apples in the bags are usually all “small” apples, and they come in at 55 calories a piece. They are also cheaper, and I think they taste better.

I could not believe how little 1 oz. of spinach looks like. This happens to be the same caloric value as 1 cup, so if you’re on a diet like Atkins, 1 oz. is the portion you want. Weigh out some greens and do the comparison on Fitday some time to see for yourself. It’s particularly hard to measure cucumbers, peppers and onions in a cup measure. Your values will be *wildly* different than you expect. Long story short – buy a food scale and weigh your portions, or you’re only pretending to track carbs or calories or whatever.

Don’t get me started on how small a 3 oz. portion of meat actually looks. If you’ve never weighed it out, you’d be shocked.

OK, a little more about Lights Out. It pulls together a lot of things I’ve read about elsewhere, and it makes a lot of sense. The style is very conversational and a little goofy, and T.S. Wiley does not have any letters after her name. It’s still very much worth a read. The gist of it is seasonal eating and behavior. The author discusses how food appears in nature (seasonally) and discusses how our evolution and our nature is set to handle it. We are designed to accumulate fat in the late summer while there’s a lot of fruit available. So, we eat a lot of fruit and we gain fat. This is designed to keep us warm and fed in the winter. As the weather grows cold, our ancestors switched to mostly animal foods (and roots, but even those go if the ground freezes) and slept a lot more since it was dark out most of the time.

If you don’t sleep enough, you screw up all your hormones, including and especially insulin, and will fall prey to obesity, diabetes, cancer or any one of the degenerative diseases so many people suffer these days. She says you should start transitioning to sleeping 9.5 hours per night as the daylight hours start decreasing (late September). Basically, she says you should sleep “as much as you can without getting fired or divorced”, and that you should get up as close to dawn as possible. She also claims that if you don’t cut back on carbs at that point, you’re going to gain fat because you’re engineered to do exactly that. No cardio either – yoga, walking and maybe moderate weight lifting. Cardio causes more cortisol to be released which is your body *panicking*. That’s not something you want to happen, obviously.

I’ve been reading a lot about how chronic cardio is unhealthy. If you’ve never heard that before, you should look into it. You’re probably not getting as much benefit from cardio as you think you are.

The book is good, and there’s even a Kindle version. It pulls together Primal/Evolutionary Fitness, eating a paleolithic diet, various sleep studies and many other bits and pieces I’ve picked up here and there.