get a food scale

I’m just gonna come out and say it.

If you’re on a weight loss journey I think you should go get a food scale if you don’t have one already. I’m not saying you have to count calories or weigh everything you eat, but I really do feel that the lessons you learn from weighing foods you eat here and there is priceless.

I didn’t get a food scale till after I was a year into my weight loss journey. I was at around 50% to my goal, had lost around 20kg and was calorie counting the whole time. I had gone from purely eyeballing & estimating calories, to using food labels as rough guides, to using measurement cups, and the final step was to get the food scale. Thinking back I should have just jumped straight into getting a food scale, but I was really reluctant back then cos I didn’t want to be “that guy.”

I know I know, in hindsight it was just goofy & silly of me to worry about such thing, but I thought getting a food scale and measuring all the foods I eat would make me that “obsessive guy” and I didn’t know if I want to join the dark side.

There’s no dark side.

I definitely read too much manga & watched too much TV growing up. Getting the food scale was one of the best additions to my weight loss journey.

The main thing a food scale teaches you is portions. If you’ve never weighed the foods you eat before, you really don’t have a realistic idea of how much certain portions are. I remember weighing cashews and almonds and was super surprised cos 100kcal worth of them was barely 5-7 nuts. I thought it would be closer to a handful.

I remember weighing weight rice to exactly 200g and thinking “wow, this is actually a pretty decent portion.” All these things I wouldn’t have been able to figure out if I didn’t have a food scale. As I weighed my foods everyday, I got more and more confident with my diet cos there was little to no guess work anymore.

I knew exactly how much I was eating.

It’s a freeing feeling.

So much of weight loss for the majority of my life was dealing with uncertainty. The food scale gave me certainty, it’s such a rare confidence booster.

Before, whenever people asked me whether they should get a food scale or not I’d say it’s not a necessity. Which is true, you don’t need one to progress towards your goals. But the more I thought about it over the years, the more I felt that it’s such a small investment for such valuable potential lessons learned.

You don’t need to get some fancy digital food scale. A manual food scale like the ones they use in wet markets will do just as well. Food scales are mostly quite cheap and basically last you a lifetime. They can also help you with measuring ingredients for baking if you ever get into that.

Play around with the food scale.

Measure the amount of rice you usually eat. Measure out what 30g of Cheetos looks like. Measure what 500g of watermelon looks like. Measure how many grams a tablespoon of oil is.

Knowledge is everything. Understanding is confidence. A lot of times the guilt we feel from the journey really just comes from uncertainty, and the food scale and help us break through that. 

Get a food scale.

If you have one already take some time to play around with it and measure foods and portions you usually eat. You don’t have to count calories, this is just an ultimate lesson of portion control.

—Po