light bulb: take half my restaurant lunch home to weigh it

greaseswabber

I'm sure this has been suggested before, because on this forum everything has been. But I've never read it, my cursory search turned up empty, and this is a huge breakthrough for me so I want to share it.

I went to lunch today with work colleagues to our current favorite Chinese restaurant. I got chicken and vegetables in a pepper sauce with brown, not fried, rice. The lunch comes with an egg roll, dumplings, soup, and a little salad. I ate half of everything except the egg drop soup and the salad. I ate all of those. I estimated portion sizes the best I could, but I was sure I was off. I packed up the other half to take home.

Back to work, then to the gym for a quick work out. Getting back in my car I saw the leftovers. And then it hit me. I could go home and weigh them on my food scale. And that's exactly what I did. I was actually pretty close on my estimates. I still don't know which exact ingredients were used. There could be oil or butter or other extra calories. But I know how much it weighed.So I'm that much closer to an accurate logging of restaurant lunch. Which I go to to all the time because that is when we get a lot of our business done.

Work lunch was one of the things that derailed me before. Hopefully this will help keep me on track.

Alatariel75

That makes a hell of a lot of sense. I'm TERRIBLE at estimating values, whether ot be weight, length, volume or numbers. Estimating at restaurants is almost pointless for me, for that reason. Taking half home (or any amount, so long as you know roughly how much that is) and weighing it could work