Absolutely. Every day. I count calories as well as carbs and that's the only way I really know what's going in.

GSD_Mama wrote: »

it's getting to the point that I pretty much know what food weights

That's what I found. I only used it in the early days till I was pretty well trained on portion sizes.

azcowgirrlup wrote: »

I am wondering how many of you use a kitchen scale. . They seem rather inexpensive, but I don't need another kitchen tool that I don't use. . Are they really helpful to you? I do wonder if some of my portions are off, but I am curious if a scale has helped any of you. TIA!

Ditto all of the above. If your plan is to lose weight, then a scale is an excellent tool. I religiously use MFP and a kitchen scale. Now that I've used the scale for 8ish months and since I will be entering maintenance by the end of the year, ~ I want to be able to know how much food I am ingesting. Yes, its a hassle now, logging and weighing, but they are teaching tools. My goal, in maintenance, is to eat properly without the use of scales and MFP.

And its certainly an eye opener to how easy it is to put too much (calories and/or carbs) on your plate. To not use a scale & MFP, would be like trying to run a company without the use of accounting software, and not write down your checks in your checkbook ledger. Use this analogy:

Kitchen scale/Weighing food = how much the check amount is
MFP = a checkbook ledger and/or accounting software

Do you think a company could survive without the two things above? MFP and scales help us correctly account for carbs & calories.

I help people now in my church, and I tell them to forget about successfully losing weight if they can't, at minimum, do MFP. I further tell those, that eat a lot of home cooked meals, to get a scale. If you eat at chain restaurants, you pretty much can find the correct size/portion on MFP. But the home cooked meals don't have bar-codes on them.

I hope this helps,

Dan the Man from Michigan
It's Ketogenic or Bariatric! How I Found the Ketogenic Diet
Blog #10 Keto: Abbreviations, Acronyms & Terminology Used on the LCD & Keto Discussion Groups
Blog #13 DittoDan's Milestone's, First's And Good Changes Since Starting the Ketogenic Diet
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I use it, and unlike lots of kitchen things, it really takes up very little space and is not expensive compared to many other things you can get for the kitchen.

Love my scale. Daily user. It is a pretty cheap one. Got it at WalMart.

I use one and it's very helpful. Very! It's amazing to discover how much I'd really been eating. Seeing how many cashews is 1 oz. vs. how many I'd been eating before. omg...

I bought a digital one that's really flat and fits nicely on top of my microwave which has a very small clearance between it and the cupboard above. So the scale isn't in my way at all. I don't even worry too much about if it's getting dusty because I never put food directly on it. I use a plate or something and put the food in that. So I just wipe it as I'm wiping up around the counter.

Monklady123 wrote: »

I use one and it's very helpful. Very! It's amazing to discover how much I'd really been eating. Seeing how many cashews is 1 oz. vs. how many I'd been eating before. omg...

I bought a digital one that's really flat and fits nicely on top of my microwave which has a very small clearance between it and the cupboard above. So the scale isn't in my way at all. I don't even worry too much about if it's getting dusty because I never put food directly on it. I use a plate or something and put the food in that. So I just wipe it as I'm wiping up around the counter.

On the cahsews...

1/4 cup serving. That is silly. Who eats that tiny bit? That is a tease not a serving!

A single ounce as well. Just not right.

When I joined MFP I thought that to weigh and log everything was a bore. I sometimes used to log but I guesstimated the weight. Then I started ZC and because it was such an extreme diet I wanted a rigorous idea of what was happening so for the last month I weighed everything except seasonings. Guess what? My "guesstimates" were almost always wrong, sometimes by a lot. So, still a bore but now I use the scale for everything and log what I actually eat.

I use mine daily, I actually found for a lot of things that my guesstimates were under what the actual serving size was. You definitely need one for accurate logging.