Poll on Food Scale

I use a food scale, well for now I'm using a mailing scale until I can get a food scale.

I do measure my food and I try to be as accurate as possible.

i like to use mine because it makes measuing easier for recipes, and because i am anal that i am actually eating the amount that i think i am. i love it, i use it several times a day

Go look at this though perhaps you've seen it:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/872212-you-re-probably-eating-more-than-you-think

My scales has oz/lbs and once I watched the youtube video within the above post, I realized that I need a new scale that does grams. I wouldn't take it to a restraurant with me but I do weigh at home.

I don't use one. I've tinkered with serving size enough that I'm hitting my weekly target without one. If you find that you're not meeting your goals then I would suggest one.

Also, calories in food can be off based on how the FDA allows them to be labeled so even prepackaged food may be off when using a scale.

Well I guess I've always just kind of taken the nutrition info from label...ie 14 triscuits, 1 cup of pasta, 1 egg, 1 piece of toast, etc. Like for breakfast I have a piece of toast, an egg, 2 turkey sausage links. Why would I need a food scale for that? For dinners I cook a lot of recipes off skinnytaste.com and just use her nutritional info...how would the scale help that? I really don't count veggies in my diary because I feel they are so low calorie they don't really need to be counted.

Again, not trying to sound naive, just looking for awesome advice

Thanks!

You don't count vegetables? (what about fruit?)
You might not need to weigh a piece of toast but what if you want peanut butter or butter on that toast? It's much more accurate to weigh things like that in grams.

I have a food scale, but I have to admit that I don't use it that often. I know that it would be more accurate, but really calorie counting is estimation anyway. I look at serving size, and try to estimate based on that...so if say I have a can of beans, and it says that there are two servings in there, I try to get about half. I figure I'll eat the other half the next day anyway, so what difference does it make? So at the end of the day am I really netting 1326 calories? Probably not. But I figure if I'm losing at a reasonable safe rate, then I'm guessing close enough.

Now if I were not losing at what MFP says that my calories should be, that's the first thing I would do...is start weighing and measuring more, because then I would figure my estimations were off.

I use the scale all the time. One reason is most of my foods do not come with nutritional labels. The ones that do are off on their serving sizes. For example, my carrots say a serving size is about 5 carrots or 28g. When you weigh out the carrots it more like 10 carrots.

If I want to accurate I need to weigh. It's that simple.

I use my scale every every time I eat. Mostly convert it to grams to be exact.

I have a small digital one. I use it constantly.

If you are not using a food scale, you are not counting calories.

THIS

Especially for volume measurements of non-liquid items. For example, how many strawberries is in 1/2 a cup? No way to know without knowing how big the strawberries were and how tightly they were packed. The same thing is true for flour which is why many bakers, me included, use weight measurements to make bread.

As to scales, all you need is a $20 digital one from a big box store or online. Digital means you can measure in either English or metric and can set the tare button to add a second ingredient.

For example, I most recently ate 1 serving of cottage cheese with one serving of raisins stirred in (and a little cinnamon which I didn't bother to weigh). Right on the cottage cheese container it tells me 1 serving is 114 grams for 110 calories. On the raisin bag it says 40 grams is a serving of raisins. Put the bowl on the scale and clicked the "tare" button to get it back to zero. Then I measured in the cottage cheese, put the dirty spoon in the bowl and reset to zero. Next I measured in the raisins. Voila. Done. And no extra measuring cups dirty either.