Importance of Weighing your Food
Exploring why we should weigh out your food when able to stay on track with your health goals
Have you ever wondered why your meticulous calorie counting doesn’t always yield the expected results? The answer might be sitting right in your kitchen, it could be your measuring tools! Weighing your food is more than a practice; it’s a precision tool for managing your health and fitness goals. This is going to be one of the most significant changes that we can make, it is one thing to measure your foods out, but it is another to be precise with the food in weight. When able, we want to do this in weight to make sure we are getting the most accurate numbers out there. I want to highlight a few different topics to make it understandable why this idea is so important to understand how it will easily benefit you in the kitchen and working toward your goals! These topics are going to be the inherent variance within nutrition labels, how we are using the measuring tools, and then some recent studies that have come out on just how poorly we can judge our food if we don’t work on the skill of intuitive eating.
Label Variance: Despite the best efforts of food manufacturers, the nutritional labels on food products can have a variance of up to 20%. This means that a 100-calorie snack could be anywhere between 80 to 120 calories without you realizing it. This comes to the first hang-up on many people’s radar, our body has a great way of auto-regulating out much of this variance so it doesn’t end up being a big deal, but when we start stacking a few of these snacks in a day, happen to hit a few of the higher calories options, then we are starting to look at getting out of the zone where your body can auto-regulate away. Your body wants to ideally stay at the same body weight, so having around 100 calories over what is expected or under what is expected, you don’t need to do much as your body will increase its non-exercise related calorie burning, this could be by a bit more fidgeting, you might notice you’re pacing a bit more, all of this is your bodies natural response to fighting against overeating to maintain that energy balance. This idea of the inherent inaccuracy within the labels is the start of the reasons that we want to work toward weighing everything where possible.
Measuring Tools: The next idea is utilizing measuring tools when we are cooking. When we scoop or pack ingredients into measuring cups, the actual quantity can vary significantly. A lightly filled cup of flour can weigh 30% less than a densely packed one, leading to substantial discrepancies in calorie counts. I know the convenience of measuring out a cup and throwing that into a bowl may seem easy and fast to do, but oftentimes it is! When people start to measure things out they try to get precise with it but then don’t take into account that the amount in there isn’t truly standardized. Stack a few of these measured-out ingredients and if each one is tightly packed it can quickly raise a 500-calorie meal to a 750+ calorie meal in a hurry without you even noticing. Pairing the inherent inaccuracy within the labels, then inaccuracies with how much is truly in the measuring cups, it can stack up so people are quickly overeating far more than they originally thought they were. The easiest examples of this idea can come from accurately measuring out fats like sour cream or peanut butter. It is always a surprise how little 1 serving, typically 1 tablespoon, really is. This is usually when people start to dive deep into how accurate their calorie tracking is.
Caloric Misestimation: Both of these stack in to fight against you, to path into the idea of caloric misestimation. Past and current studies show that people tend to overestimate their calorie intake by up to a staggering 50% and underestimate the calories they burn by the same amount. This makes sense on the intake side from factoring in the ideas above, when you put into your food tracking software that you ate a cup of cooked rice, but that cooked rice was packed significantly tighter, thus increasing the density and leading to an overestimation and further confusion. Then as we get more and more sedentary as a society, the perceived effort of movement increases, thus furthering the divide in how much people believe they are burning versus what they are burning. Putting the whole picture together, with the inaccuracies in the labels, the inaccuracies of using measuring devices, then the overestimation of movement and underestimation of how much is eaten, it is no mystery how we as a society get to the point that we are at.
Intuitive Eating: Now that we understand why it is important to weigh out your food so we can mitigate the amount of inaccuracies within what we are eating and make sure that we are eating what we say we are eating. Let’s then make this something that leads toward actionable change that we can build off of. This is where we bring in the skill of intuitive eating. This is the idea that we have well built-up understanding of what we should be eating, how much that is, and how much that looks like. The ideal gold standard of how to live your life without stressing too much and staying in maintenance of where you’re at. If you’re training toward a goal, it can have use but you won’t be making dedicated directed progress toward the goal as quickly as you could if you were more strict with it. This idea of intuitive eating is built up with time, experimentation, and actively paying attention to how much you’re putting into each meal. This builds up the mental understanding of what 8 ounces of chicken looks like and how to build up the idea of what you’re looking for. That is the big overall goal that we want to be working toward. Since you can’t make life morph around your fitness goals, you need to make your fitness goals morph around your life. This is why the idea of intuitive eating can be very beneficial to the overall goals!
In conclusion, the practice of weighing your foods is an important tool in managing your health and fitness goals. However, we have the inherent variances within nutrition labels and the significant discrepancies that can arise when relying solely on measuring tools. Studies revealing the widespread tendency to misestimate calorie intake and expenditure further underscore the need for precision when we are tracking our foods. By embracing the practice of weighing our foods, we can be confident that what we are eating is what we say we are eating. Weighing our foods combats the inaccuracies inherent in labeling and measuring, ensuring that what we track aligns closely with reality. This precision not only enhances the effectiveness of our calorie-counting efforts but also fosters a deeper understanding of portion sizes and nutritional intake. Ultimately, by prioritizing accuracy in our food measurements, we lay a solid foundation for the skill of intuitive eating. That we can continue to build on to make sure we stay on the right path as life continues. Regularly checking in with that skill and building it up will ensure that you can maintain where you’re at with little thought put into it. Do not be scared of the scale, it is just another tool that can be very helpful in our overall goal of getting healthy and staying at the desired weight. It is something that should be embraced as extra accountability and accuracy.
If you need further ideas on how to implement these changes, how to break down your caloric intake, or anything else related to tracking your food feel free to shoot me a message, or if you have topics that you’d like me to chat about, questions, clarity, or any other feedback please feel free to reach out to my email at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com also share this around with anybody who may find some useful information within this or any of my other posts. The more people that get the information to them, one step at a time we can hopefully work to build a more healthy society!
Until next time,
Sidney Bartlett, CSCS