Breakfast Portion Distortion Nightmare

ah, pizza...

I had toko (Indonesian food) yesterday. I put it in calories as about a thousand but I'm afraid it's more as I dont' know exactly what they cook with. However, it's a family-owned place and the food is delicious so who cares if I'm diligent on most other days

as for portion sizes and things you eat: you get used to the reduced size surprisingly quickly. But you're right, it's important to know just how much of something you eat if it's in your routine. It doesn't meant that you have to change your routine necessarily - you could change other things instead - but it's definitely best to know!

The thing is, with excercise and logging most of your calories correctly you'll probably still lose the weight; however once you hit maintenance and want to ease up on the calories and you're underestimating what you're actually eating, THEN youhave a problem.

I weigh my porridge (or rather the uncooked oats) every now and then, and most of the time I estimate it. I usually have a dessertspoon of coarse oatmeal. I then add other things to it. If I want to check how much I'm having, I put the bowl on the scales and then zero it before adding the spoonful of oats. Then I zero before adding each ingredient (oat bran, dried fruit, chopped nuts, seeds, etc.), and count it all up and put it into MFP as a recipe. Then I just try to put the same amounts in every day by eyeballing them or counting them (e.g. my apricot porridge allows for 2 dried apricots).

I know just what you mean about cereal portions. I very occasionally have Fruit n Fibre, and I have a 30g portion. I'm used to it now, but it looks TINY when you first weigh it out! Again, the easiest way to do it is to put the bowl on the scales and zero it, but I'm also pretty good at estimating now.

With milk I've just checked how much I've used out of the milk carton by the end of the day, and every day, I add an amount which I know covers it (200 ml, although I don't usually use quite that much), then only add extra if I have more than usual. With cereal, again, I've got used to seeing what it looks like in the bowl (I only use a tiny bit).

So I think it's fine to estimate BUT you must have a really good visual idea of how much your portion is, and not try to sneak some extra in just because you're not weighing (I say this because I'm tempted to do this - lol!). And I do think you need to start off with weighing so that you can get the idea in your head - either what it looks like at the bottom of the bowl, or a spoonful, or how many nuts, etc.

I found if i used big bowls or plates i would tend to fill them up, cause the normal portion looks tiny

So think you should use smaller dishes

So far my food scale has been my single most important purchase in this journey. It was a real eye-opener. Some things I was over eating, yet many veggies I was way under estimating.

i know how you feel!
today i fancied something different for my breakfast instead of oatmeal or a smoothie..so i decided on some crispy oat bran cereal that i had bought but never tried...looked up on mfp to see calorie content...30g was 122cal....well, 30g was absolutely tiny portion so i weighed out 90g!...366 calories and that was before i added some fat free greek style coconut flavoured yoghurt, mixed seeds, few almonds, chia seeds and few almonds...think my total calories for my healthy breakfast was 600!!!! omg!...it was nice tho and it filled me up all morning lol!!!

A month is not a long time in the weight loss world.

You should be losing at a snail's pace, as you have so little to lose.

Over-estimating your cereal is not a nightmare.

I'm glad you have got your portion sizes under control.

There was a really interesting segment in Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me which was on how portion sizes at McDonalds have changed dramatically over the last 50 or so years. So every time I think I'm depriving myself just because restaurant or cafe food portions look so different, I remind myself of that segment.

It basically went that what we now consider to be a kid's serving, whether it's a burger or fries or soda, back then it was the adult size portion. So it's not like for like. People are getting bigger because the expectations of what a meal should look like is getting bigger. Plates are bigger. Cups are bigger etc.
The first few weeks were weird and I found myself hungry or wanting food because I expected to eat more at meals. Now I'm starting to adjust... thank heavens!

I measure everything. Measuring cups are really useful because it is really easy if your eyeballing things to be way off. MFP uses the standard measuring systems so a cup....is a cup. Now could it be that maybe there is an extra half strawberry in there that makes its stick out of the cup?? Sure but like you said who is going to get fat over 1 or 2 extra strawberries? Nobody. But I find that it keeps me honest with myself about what I'm putting in my face. I wouldn't beat yourself up too much though... it was a shock to me when I started paying attention to the amount of calories I was actually consuming, it happens.

Good luck to you.

Now that's the sort of solution I like!

If you scoff a third Weetabix then it's impossible to persuade yourself that you've only had two.