My perfect companion to MyFitnessPal

MarkToronto · September 2010

I recently have jumped back on the diet bandwagon after several months of working too hard and eating too much take out because there was never anything healthy in the house.

I dusted off an old piece of equipment that I used to use long before I joined myfitnesspal - as I used to do the same thing that this site does, but in a spreadsheet I had created.

A set of scales that counts calories.
If you search Amazon for "Digital Diet Scale with Presets" you can see the one I have. It comes up as the first result.

If you want to build yourself a salad for example, you just zero out the scale with a bowl on it.
Throw in some lettuce, punch in the code for lettuce, then hit kCal. Then you can add as many calories of lettuce to the bowl as you want, and mark down how many calories that is. Then you zero out the scale again, punch in the code for tomato, and hit kCal, then add as much tomato as you want, and mark down the amount of calories.

Once you keep doing that, you add it all up at the end, and that's how many calories your salad was.

But it works for everything. You can do your whole meal this way. Takes the guesswork out of recording calories I find.

It may be a little too much for some people. But I find it helps me learn (as I prep a meal) exactly how much calories are in food. Helps when you are eating out, and don't have your scales too, because you learn how many calories are typically in a portion based on what you learned on your scales over time.

Anyway...
Hope it helps some of you.
I never knew such a device existed until somebody told me about it, so I figured I would pay it forward ;o)