Knowing how to weigh and measure your food accurately is an extremely important thing
to know how to do if you're wanting to track your calorie or your macronutrient intake.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dustin Williams, and for the best health,
nutrition and fitness advice, make sure to subscribe to my channel. Hit that little notification
bell so that you're notified when I post a new video every week. Anything that you ingest,
it needs to be weighed and it needs to be measured, especially if you're trying to count your
calories or if you're trying to count macros. This can be liquids is going to be solid foods,
even some supplements would need to be weighed. And the thing is is that if you're going to
take the time to track calories or track macronutrients, you want to make sure that you're doing it
accurately. And that's what I'm going to show you. Everything
that you need to know about that in this video. The great part about doing this is that you
only need one thing in order to do this and to do it accurately. And that is a digital
scale is the only thing that you're going to need. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually
going to link below in the description to want on Amazon that you can pick up. There
are only about $10 but you can really get them anywhere. You can pick them up at Walmart
local store or use the link below to pick one. $10 is a pretty good one. They last forever.
And I have had mine for years. I've never even changed a battery out of it. Pretty easy
to use. So the first thing that I want to do is actually go over the scale and explain
how it works, just in the basics of it and go over the few buttons so that you understand
all of the basics of using the scale. So most of these scales are going to have
anywhere between two and three buttons. Of course you've got your on off switch to turn
it on. Then you're going to have your a Z T, which essentially means to clear it. So
if you were to sit anything on top of it and if you wanted to clear it out, you can click
this and it goes automatically back to zero weight. Same thing. Take this off if I wanted
to clear it back to zero and it takes that. The other thing is the units, right now it's
set up in pounds and ounces. From there you've got ounces and from there you've got grams.
Now whenever doing any type of weight measurement, I highly recommend that you really only use
the ounces and the grams feature. These are the only two that I recommend whenever you're
trying to weigh your food and use these scales. Now the reason that I said that I only recommend
that you use scales and not measuring cups is because whenever we are weighing and measuring
food in order to be accurate, it's really important that we are weighing by weight and
not by volume as this can be an inaccurate method. And whenever you are just a little
bit inaccurate, multiple times a day, it tends to add up. So again, going back to if you
want to do this accurately if you're going to take the time to do it, you want to make
sure that you're doing it right. So I typically don't use these. I usually use this scale
and I'm going to give you an example and show you why that's the case. So the example that
I'm going to use here and explain to you why I always use a scale instead of measuring
cups is I've got some oats here, I'm gonna use this as an example. So if we look at the
back, and I'll show you this here in just a second, it says that a serving size is half
a cup dry, which is also 40 grams in weight. So if you take a look at this, and you can
see it's about half a cup for a serving size and 40 grams in weight is what we're looking
at here. So if that was the case I'm going to do is sit this here on the scale.
And turn the scale on so it's automatically zeroed out. I'm going to hit the unit button
a couple of times to make it go over to grams and I'm going to take out what would be considered
about half a gram or half a cup. So that's a pretty level half cup. It's not overflowing
by any means. Pretty good half cup and if you actually look at the scale, the scale
itself is saying that this is 50 grams in weight. So you can see here that it's 50 grams
in weight even though it says that a half cup is only supposed to be 40 grams in weight.
So that's a pretty decent increase in calories. If you were just doing one serving size, if
you did this for two serving sizes or three, it would continue to get worse and more of
this you ate. This is why it's really important that we are weighing by the actual weight
and not by the volume. Another thing that you want to pay attention to, and it seems
almost silly to mention this, but it's also really easy to overlook this and that's that.
You want to make sure that when you are weighing and measuring that you're only measuring what
you're eating. So let me give you an example here. Let's
talk about this Apple. So if somebody was to eat an Apple, it's not uncommon. Somebody
might weigh the Apple to see and get an idea of how much it weighs. So they turn the scale
on, they turn it to either ounces or grams. I'm going to go ahead and put grams. And when
I sit this on the scale, it currently shows that this Apple weighs 240 grams. If you were
to put that in there, you would put that you ate 240 grams worth of Apple if you put that in
your tracker. Now the downside of that is I'm not going to eat the whole core, I'm not
going to eat this. So it's going to make a difference. So if I use my fancy little Apple
core slicer here, cut this,
knock these off. Now typically I would have a plate here. I just don't happen to have
one on me at the moment. But sit the pieces of Apple here on top of it because this is
what I'm actually going to eat. So we've now from 240 grams down to 214 grams because the
core of this leftover, and here I'm not going to be eating. So this is the part that you
want to measure. This is going to go with pretty much anything else that you put in
there. So think about a banana, like you don't want to weigh the whole banana. You're going
to take the peel off and you're going to measure just the part of the banana that you're going
to eat. So make sure that that's something that you're considering whenever you're weighing
food. Another thing to consider is whenever it comes to weigh and measuring your liquids.
Now here's the thing that I highly recommend is that you do this based on grams based
on the weight. Whenever you put something on the scale and you move the scale over ounces,
it's measuring it and ounces by weight. Now if you look at whatever you're drinking, if
it's milk or orange juice or whatever liquid you're potentially putting in there that contains
calories if you're trying to measure, most of the time it's telling you the serving size
based on a fluid ounce and a fluid ounce is based on the volume of what you're drinking.
So 12 fluid ounces of orange juice is not gonna be the same as 12 ounces in weight of
juice. It's going to be different. So anytime that you were drinking something, any type
of liquid that contains calories, I highly recommend that you weigh it by grams in order
to be accurate. And then when you put it into your tracker
that you are putting that in there as grams so that you know that you're doing it 100%
of the point. Another question that I get asked a lot is, should you measure your food
raw or after you cook it? Now here's the thing. Either way is fine and either way can work.
My first recommendation is that whichever way you choose to go, be consistent with it,
don't go back and forth and doing it raw and measuring it one time and cooked another time.
Make sure that you are being consistent in the way that you choose to measure it. Either
way. From there, my personal recommendation, not a requirement. What I have found easiest
for me and typically for most of my clients is to measure it raw. So a couple of other
things to think about here. If you were cooking chicken or beef or something
like that, that you know that you're going to have to cook when you look at the information
on the back, the nutritional information. So if you're using your app to scan it and
you're trying to be accurate with that, it's giving you the nutritional information based
on it being raw. So the easiest way is if you are cooking five or six ounces of chicken
is to weigh out five or six ounces of chicken on the scale and then input that into your
tracker as five to six ounces of chicken and whatever it comes out to be. It's still the
same. You don't have to worry about reweighing. The only time that this is going to be an
issue that you have to do, just a little bit of math, not very much, just a little bit,
is if you are someone that cooks in bulk. So if you, on Sunday you decided to cook all
your chicken for the entire week and you have to portion it out from there. This is where
you're gonna have to do a little bit of math. So let me give you a little bit of example.
So let's say that you're cooking some ground beef and you're making it for the week, and
whenever you lay all the ground beef out that you're going to cook, it is 800 grams worth
of beef. All right? So what you would do is you would take that number, that 800 grams
of beef, and you would write it down after you cook it. So once you've cooked it and
you've drained it and what you have left, you're going to weigh it again. Now, I'm just
making up numbers here, but if you had 800 raw, after you cooked it, it dropped to 700
grams raw, so you lost a hundred grams in weight based on doing this.
What you're going to do is you're going to take 800 and divide it by 700 when you do
that, you're going to get 1.14 so you're just going to have to remember that 1.14 and then
you will put your meals in the fridge, do whatever you're going to do with them, freeze
them. When you pull the meals back out, however much you take out, so let's say that you decided
to take out 300 grams worth of that 700 grams is left. You would take that 300 the amount
you took out and multiply it by the 1.14 whenever you multiply that by 1.14 you're going to
get 342 so that would be the number that you would enter into your tracker based on the
raw weight. Hopefully, that makes sense. It'll make more sense if you actually go through
the process. It's not complicated. It'll take you like an extra minute or two to do the
math and then you've got it set for the week. If you end up cooking in bulk, so remember,
just take the raw weight divided into the cooked weight and then take that number and
multiply it by however much you take out for your servings whenever it's already cooked
and enter that number into your tracker to make it 100% accurate. Now there are other
ways to do it. This is what I found the easiest. My clients seem to like the best. This would
be the one that I would recommend if you were going to do cook things in bulk. Now, this
video is all about how to weigh and measure your food whenever you're trying to accurately
track calories, but if you need some help or some assistance and figuring out how many
calories you should eat in order to get fat loss, I've actually done a video on this topic.
I will link to that video down below in the description.
You can click that and learn exactly how to come up with those numbers. So at this point,
you know how to accurately weigh and measure your food for calorie counting and macronutrient
counting. But whenever it comes to creating a nutritional lifestyle, there's more to it
than that. So what I've done for you guys is I've put together a completely free guide,
my yoyo dieting cure, and I've actually linked to that below in the description. You can
click the link, go to the site and download this Yo yo dieting cure completely for free, which
is really going to help make sure that it puts you on a nutritional lifestyle so that
once you lose the weight and you get into the habit that you're able to keep it off
and not getting it back. So make sure to check that out. Completely free down below in the
description. Also, if you liked this video, I would really appreciate it if you would
smash that light button and subscribe to the channel. And of course, if you guys have any
questions, make sure to comment down below and let me know. I'd be happy to help out.
But otherwise, I saw you guys in the next video.