I use my kitchen scale all the time. I double track MFP and WW. Now if I can ever control the "snackage".Got until next Wednesday morning to keep from paying for next month. I know it's "short money", but between TOL's guff and my pride.....

Interesting question, Derrick.

I would agree completely with Steve's first paragraph that the amount and type of food you consume is what will drive your weight. We probably all ended up here because of some version of overeating. Tracking is simply the act of recording that information, and to me it’s important largely because it means being accountable for the choices you made.

But I diverge from Steve on the second paragraph (no surprise) in that tracking, for me, also means recognizing that a boundary exists for how much and what type of food I can safely consume and still manage my weight. I’ve joking said in the past that the only thing I do intuitively is reach for seconds, and that’s still mostly true. Tracking, and living largely within a defined range of intake, is like the guardrails along the road. I can drive what I want and how I want, and the guardrails are there to keep me from going into a dangerous situation where I could hurt myself. Similarly, I can eat what I choose and the amount I choose, and my defined range of input is there to help keep me from harming my target weight.

I do use portion control as part of staying within boundaries. The handful of cereal, weighing my PopChips, using the mini Kind bars instead of the large ones, slicing cheese into weight-friendly increment to when I bring it home, portioning a large steak when eating out so that it’s two meals - these are all ways that I use portions. I think that for me, at least, portions and tracking are intertwined like the chicken and the egg. Portions are how I stay within my defined range of intake, and tracking is a guardrail that keeps me within those more reasonable portions. If I didn’t track I would be less accountable for portions, and if I didn’t portion things I wouldn’t accurately know what I was tracking.

Wow, that got long-winded! That’s what happens when you’ve got a question that provokes some real thought about what we do and why we do it.

88olds wrote: »

I still remember starting WW, getting a food scale & crunching the numbers. It was immediately apparent that my idea of a reasonable portion in those days was completely out of whack.

Yup! I think most of us said, WHAT???

I do monitor portion size. My problem usually is not portion size. It's too many portion sizes.