Just curious - do you eat the serving size or just whatever amount you want?

barbecuesauce

umblue wrote: »

This is all very interesting. I'm very early in my fitness/weight loss journey and right now serving size is working for me; I round up always if I'm unsure - but I'm sure I will eventually have to spring for a scale to make sure I stay accurate.

If you have 100+ pounds to go and are logging fairly accurately with measuring cups, it might be a while before a scale is essential.

But if you stall (fail to lose weight for more than a few weeks), you know what to do. And if you still don't have it when you go from obese to overweight, make purchasing one your priority.

TheGoktor

What is a reasonable 'serving size' for a woman of 5'0" who works at a desk (for example) is not going to be anywhere near adequate for a man of 6'0" who digs ditches (for example), so isn't it better to make our own judgement, according to our own needs, and simply fit it into our daily allowance, rather than be ruled by an arbitrary number made up by a marketing department in order to give the illusion that their product is healthier than that of their competitors?

I have little idea what serving sizes for most foods are supposed to be anyway - approx. 99% of my entries are my own, taken from the USDA database. I always enter the serving size as 100g, that way the entry comes up as 100g, and it's really easy to just log a decimal, or a number of grams.



The only exception is when I'm calculating my own recipes, so a serving size may be a quarter or half, or a third of the dish I've made. But that's fine, I portion my dishes out, according to our needs, and everything that goes into my recipes has been weighed anyway.

Almost everything I eat is grown or made locally (fruit, veg, herbs, bread, cheese, milk, olive oil, passata, etc.), and not always packaged - that's just the way it is here in small towns in southern Italy. Even the wine we have here is produced at a vineyard an hour's walk away... it doesn't have a label, let alone a serving size!

When I do eat packaged foods, e.g. yoghurt, I either weigh out what I want to eat (if it's a large tub), or have one or two 125g cartons, depending on how hungry I am. For things like dried pasta, I weigh a dry portion - again, according to how hungry I am; it could be 50g, 75g, or 100g. I don't think I've ever looked on a packet to see if there's a recommended serving size!

berndanddana

I don't use a scale because I don't have one yet. I have been going by the serving size and logging that and so far that has been sufficient as I am losing weight