The basic dieting technique is really very simple and once you understand it, much quicker than most people think.
When I tell people I weigh my food their eyes immediately gloss over and their response is I couldn't be bothered with that. When I show them what I do they realise it takes moments extra and the light bulb moment clicks.
Breakfast
For me breakfast used to be an overflowing bowl of cereal with milk, two slices of toast with jam and a glass of orange juice. Sounds pretty typical to me.
The problem is when I filled the bowl with Special K and milk I was actually having two breakfasts according to the serving size on the packaging. I'd also have thick toast and a large glass of orange juice thinking it was good for me, whereas I now realise I was consuming mostly sugar.
So here is how I do it now.
I have my scales on my kitchen bench.
I put a bowl on the scales, turn on the scales and the scales read zero.
I pour in around 30g of cereal and note the weight.
I then zero the scale.
I then poor in around 50-80g of milk and note the weight.
Currently I'm eating milo cereal which is 1,640 kilojoules per 100 grams and milk which is 265 kilojoules per 100 grams. You can read the per 100 grams energy value on the packaging.
So I would write down
Milo, 32g, 1640 kj/100g
Milk, 50g, 265 kj/100g
Actually I'd write something more like the following
Milo, 32, 1640
Milk, 50 265
I no longer have toast as a general rule. Sometimes I'll have one slice with jam. The bread I use is $1 Coles bread because two slices are 600 kj (from the packaging) thus one slice is 300 kj. The jam I weighed.
TIP. There are a couple of weighs to work out the weight. For jam you can put the toast on the scale, zero the weight, then put the jam on and return the toast to the scales. The weight is the jam that has been added. Alternately you can put the jam jar on the scales, zero the weight, then put the ham on the bread and put the jar back on the scales. The reading will be a negative value which is how much jam has been used. For a slice of toast I use around 50 g of jam.
For the jam again I just read the energy content on the packaging.
My approach would be to write down the item, weight and energy as I went through the day. When I had a moment I'd calculate the energy for each food and add them all up. I'd do this a couple of times a day so I could see how I was going. If I ate too much during the day I could see I needed to eat a smaller meal at night. Take-away food such as MacDonald's is very high in energy content even for a small cheese burger meal which means if I had that during the day I'd have to have a smaller meal at night. That's OK to me and works well.
I decided recently I'd put on some weight again and want to lose 5 kg. I'm a computer consultant so I can write programs. So instead of writing everything on paper and working out the calculations I'd always wanted a simple program I could have my on iPhone. I wrote the program as a web app which can be run from any computer. I call the program/web page Today's Diet which can be found at
http://www.justlocal.com.au/clients/dieting/today.php. I've added this page to my Home Screen on my iPhone and can now enter the information as I go and the calculations are done for me.
Weighing food can be tedious but most of the time you don't have to weigh the food. The packaging tells you how much is in a serving. For biscuits there may be one or two biscuits in a serving, but there is the energy content. So all you need to do with the Today's Diet calculator is enter "biscuit" and the energy. Press calculate and you have the total so far during the day.
Be careful of serving sizes. If you pour out a bowl of Special K you'll find you have 50-60 grams of cereal, whereas a serving size is 30g. So in effect you're eating two serves. Where the size of a food item isn't fixed you should weight it at least the first time. Today's Diet has a notes page where you can record foods you commonly eat and their energy content. This is easier than looking up the energy content of an apple or banana each time.
TIP: A good technique if you're thinking of dieting is to do a dry run for your day's eating without dieting. You'll be very surprised to find out that often you're eat more than your normal daily requirement. You can determine your normal daily energy requirement using the BMI/BMR calculator. Remember if you're eating more than your body needs, some of that excess has to be stored somewhere.
In summary then the basic dieting technique is to record during the day the energy content for the food you eat. You may have to weigh some food but most food you can simply read the energy content off the packaging.
Kelvin Eldridge