calorie counting?
I am trying to lose fat so I'm creating a 500 calorie deficit per day. I want my calorie intake to be pretty accurate, but the problem is that I'm in college and I can't cook my own foods. Which means I have to visually estimate how many calories I eat. Should I use a food scale to measure my food before I eat? I know the basic tricks to visually measuring food servings, (like a deck of cards=3 oz meat) but it can be innacurate. For example, if I eat 4 pieces of chicken, and I think its 3 oz each, but turns out to be 3.5 oz, I'm off by 2 oz or about 100 calories. If I miscalculate for other foods as well, I could be off by hundreds of calories by the end of the day.
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To answer the question you ask, yes, weighing your food is a good idea if you're serious. More than accuracy, the knowledge of the amounts that you are eating is important when you later inevitably revisit and reevaluate your plan. You will know if it's the plan that needs changing if you're not getting the desired results, shedding doubt that the blame lies in your estimation skills. However, doing this for every meal for the foreseeable future is not going to be fun. Therefore I suggest making a game out of guessing the amounts before measuring them for the first week or two, while you're enthusiastic, such that you calibrate your own estimations. If you just measure you'll get better at estimating too but it'll take longer. At any rate, once you're getting within your acceptable margin of error you can quit using the scale. This is particularly effective if there are only a handful of dishes at your dining hall which you frequent.
And also something to consider outside the direct question:
"A Calorie's a Calorie" to an extent yes but this is an incomplete way to devise an eating plan. Make sure to do your research on meal timings (intermittent fasting vs 6 meals/day) and caloric intake composition (this is extremely important). These affect both your body's adaptations to caloric restriction and your psychology (keeping you full & content). I won't provide an essay of unsolicited advice but do look into these if you haven't already and if you do want my advice on it just ask :)
If your health conscious then you have to be very careful towards the calorie that your taken daily.First of all you have to know that how many calories you need on each day to maintain your health.Its an old saying that Health is Wealth.So you need to be raise your awareness about what your body needs.You have to keep the knowledge of how much calorie are in the food and drinks taken by you in each day.The weight loss resources have the tools to count the calorie you needed in a day.
Using a scale certainly helps, both to improve accuracy when you use it, and to improve your estimations when you can't.
Don't worry too much about accuracy. If you estimate honestly, you'll err on both sides with equal likelihood, and the errors should cancel out.
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