I’m a big proponent of measuring everything you eat– A lot of people think it’s annoying, but once you get the hang of it, there’s not a whole lot to it. What’s more, once you start to understand the amount of calories in food, you find it difficult to not measure food. More importantly, though, unless you measure what you’re eating, you have no idea how many calories you’re consuming, which is the most important thing to track.
Well I Measure!
Here’s an important note, though. . . How do you measure your food? I live in the U.S., so naturally, I would use Imperial measurements like ounces, or just the recommended serving size. Then, I looked at the back of a bag of clean tortilla chips, and noticed that the recommended serving size was “9 chips.” What? 9 chips!? What size of chips are we talking about here?
Then I looked at the serving size on a bottle of Wazy Maize (A carbohydrate supplement), and I got this: “1 Heaping Scoop.” My heaping scoop may be way different than everyone else’s heaping scoop, so what does that mean!?
Basically, if you go by most recommendations, you’ll be lost. If you’re doing that much and are happy there, at least you’re counting! For someone like me, though, I have this urge to know exactly how many calories I’m consuming.
How can I be more precise?
The recommended serving size can come in one of two ways: An imperial measurement, or as an amount of product. Beside their recommendation is the actual weight of the serving, displayed in the highly accurate metric measurement of grams. For an example, we’re going to look at a box of organic granola. The serving size is 3 / 4 C, or 55g; each serving contains 250 calories. That’s a lot of calories in a relatively small amount of food, which means big variances in measurements equate to big differences in calories. So here’s what 3/4 C looks like:
Three Quarter Cups.
Here’s what 56g looks like (My scale doesn’t do odd numbers, so I have to add 1g to the serving size):
56 grams.
Maybe that’s not a good comparison– They look nearly identical. Let’s compare the measurement on the scale. On the top we have our Imperial measurement (3 / 4 C), and on the bottom we have measured it out in grams:
Almost a serving difference.
It’s amazing the difference when you’re accurately measuring. For the record, by using the imperial measurement and not the metric, I was consuming an additional 181 calories. That means that I thought I was eating 500 calories below maintenance, but it was closer to only 300 below.
My Recommendation
I’ve started transitioning over to measuring everything in grams. I’ve been on a cutting cycle for some time now, and have been wondering why I haven’t been losing fat at the rate I should be. This is probably a large part of the reason, if not all of it– I eat granola nearly every day, and maintain a 500 calorie deficit. Without knowing it, I was really only eating 319 calories below maintenance– And that’s only one food I’ve looked at. Now it makes sense why I wasn’t losing a pound of fat a week.
If you want to be as precise as possible, use the metric system.