Can you honestly judge your portion sizes and how long did it take you?

It's a game I've been playing with myself for years. I'm really good at estimating ounces on the kitchen scale. So when we had to play a "guess the weight" game at a Christmas party, we had to pick up items from a table and guess. Guess who won?

Still, I religiously use my kitchen scale.

Heh, when I'm using up the remaining egg whites left in the carton, I'm always pretty amazed at how many more grams shaking out the last few drops adds to the total weight that I've weighed out. I always expect maybe it'll add another gram or 2 with the final shakes of the carton, but it adds something like 10-30 more.

I will eyeball stuff that's so low calorie it's barely worth the bother of precise weighing or logging, like celery and cucumbers.
Also almonds. Each almond weighs about a gram, and after a good while of weighing almonds and this seeming to be always the case with almonds, I just count the number of almonds I'm going to eat and log that number as grams.

I probably eyeball other stuff from time to time, but I can't think of anything else right now. Just about everything that's not single-serving pre-packaged will get weighed.

I can do it with most things I eat frequently, but that's because I've weighed it out into the same dishes probably a hundred times or more. I know exactly what 55g of veggie ground round looks like in a pan and I know exactly what 15g of goat cheese looks like because I eat them several times a week, but I still weigh them. It doesn't really take any extra time and then I know what I'm eating.

After being on this journey for awhile, I'm really good at judging most things. Since I use the same bowls/plates, I pretty much can eyeball it. However, just to keep my skills sharp every once in awhile I'll eyeball it and then weigh/measure it to make sure I'm on track. Note - weighing and measuring everything stresses me out way too much. As long as the scale is moving down, I'm good with the eyeball method.

I get close, but not close enough. I actually tend to underestimate most of the time

I'm pretty good...I'll slice some cheese (aiming for 30g) and it'll be 29 or 31g. Or I'll put some peanut butter on my apple, and it'll be 19g (aiming for 20).

I didn't use to weigh most foods and I lost 66lbs after my 2nd baby, so I must've been doing something right. I do weigh now (losing after my 3rd baby) and I'm losing at the same rate.

Some things I have memorized like popcorn if I use the exact same bowl or container. Some extreemly low cal things in the veggie catagory I feel are not worth the bother, so I don't sweat them. But in general I can't trust myself to get it right, I end up thinking it "looks" like I can have more when Its actually at the measurement or slightly over. I don't like being a slave to the scale, but I do a lot of home cooking and need to use it. If I ate "pre-packaged" frozen dinners etc, I could relax a little, but I am trying to give up overly processed (and over priced) foods. So the work continues...

rabbitjb wrote: »

So after 9 months of weighing and conscientiously logging this morning I free-poured my eggwhites into the bowl I've used every morning to see if I could adequately judge portion size without looking at the scale.

aiming for 80 - 100g, I actually poured 126g (I appreciate that with eggwhites that means diddly-squat)

so it seems I've still not quite got it

if you judge portion sizes how long did it take you to train yourself to do it somewhat accurately

I can cut exactly two ounces of ham. I can also get cheese really close to one ounce, think .9 or 1.1 close. But, as soon as I quit weighing, I start sliding right away.

Im pretty good, I have no problem maintaining if on holidays or going somewhere for an extended period without my scale, but when I'm home I still always weigh because I like knowing for sure

It depends on the week and what kind of food it is. I'm awful at eyeballing egg whites and peanut butter but pretty dang good with cottage cheese most of the time.