Measuring Your Food

When I started my fitness journey I barely knew anything about nutrition. I knew that fruits and vegetables were healthy, but not any of the stuff that really helped me. Like

1. Calorie expenditure; calories consumed vs calories burned will determine your weight management.

   1. Caloric Maintenance: Calories Consumed = Calories Burned = Weight Maintenance

   2. Caloric Surplus: Calories Consumed > Calories Burned = Weight Gain

   3. Caloric Deficit: Calories Consumed < Calories Burned = Weight Loss

2. Caloric make up; all calories are composed of Carbohydrates, Fats and Proteins and 1g of each has it's own caloric value

   1. Carbs: 4 cals/gram

   2. Fats: 9 cals/gram

   3. Protein: 4 cals/gram

3. Flexible dieting for sustainability and long term results

   1. Essentially a lifestyle over fad diets

   2. With Fad diets (keto, paleo, Weight Watchers, DASH) you lose the results and progress once you stop/return to normal eating habits

Weight Loss

When I first started working with Personal Trainers it was an associate of my personal trainer and long time friend of mine that introduced me to food scales and weighing my food. She recommended that for my goal of weight loss that I should try weighing my food in addition to logging it in a food tracker app, because in the beginning, "eye-balling" how much food you are eating can be difficult. It's hard to tell whether a serving of rice is actually 100g when you factor in the caloric make-up and caloric expenditure, every gram counts.

After a while of measuring my meals, I began to start seeing better results. Consistent weight loss week over week. This showed me that weight management is simply basic math. If you have the formula, you can just fill in and substitute the variables to get the result you want or need.

Body Composition

After losing majority of the weight to reach my "goal." Anyone who knows me, knows that I don't like to set a goal, but rather an infinite number of milestones that are small and realistic enough to achieve but also agile to have the freedom to transform and evolve as I do as an individual. However, after losing the weight, I continued to weigh my meal components as my focus became less on a caloric deficit and more of macro ratio management; the ratio of the Carbs, Fats and Proteins I consume.

You know how they say "You are what you eat" or "You end up looking like what you eat." Well, this concept for me holds true, in that if I regularly indulge in carbs and fats over protein but still maintain a caloric deficit or maintenance , I will not necessarily gain weight (maybe a little water retention), but my body composition will most definitely be affected from an aesthetic standpoint. I will be a bit more bloated, my abs will recede and be less defined, my arms won't be as lean, etc.

I continue to measure, weigh and log my food in a food tracker even when I am not in a caloric deficit so that I ensure I am eating the necessary amount of protein and not over indulging on carbs and fats so that when I do indulge in high carb foods like pizza, pasta, sushi, french fries and wings, it is monitored and controlled in a way that I can easily hop on a quick prep cycle to be photoshoot and video shoot ready, should a last minute project come up.

Fun Facts & FAQs

There are many beliefs and opinions about weighing and measuring your food. The most common being that it is an indicator for an eating disorder or mental illness like. Which can be true, however, there are also many reasons why weighing/measuring your food can actually be beneficial to developing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. That being said, anything in excess is not a good thing. Life is about balance which I hope is made evidently clear in this post.

To monitor protein intake

For an extremely active person it is very important to ensure adequate protein consumption to sustain muscle mass. If not, it can lead to a serious or permanent injury as many forms of physical exertion result in muscle burning before fat.

Portion control

For people that struggle with portion control; either eating too much food or not enough, measuring/weighing your food can help you to ensure you are nourishing your body with the necessary amount of calories it needs to survive. No more and no less.

Some people tend to eat really fast and end up over consuming food because they're body isn't able to signal the brain that they are full in time.

If you eat out often you will probably get used to the restaurant or take-out serving portions which are more often than not way bigger than the recommended health standard, and if you have trouble leaving food on your plate you may feel forced or pressured to finish what you have. Measuring/weighing your food provides you the ability to split your serving to save it for another meal.

Ensuring a well balanced lifestyle

A lot of the time people say that a person who weighs and measures their food is living a restrictive lifestyle. But on the flip side of it, if you are strategic enough you can actually afford to indulge in flexible nutritional habits without any consequences.

By measuring, weighing and logging your food you can find sneaky and creative ways to fit that cheese burger, fully loaded pizza, pasta, or all you can eat sushi meal into your meal plan regularly without it affecting your body or fitness goals. You can even find ways that those indulgent meals can enhance your physique and workout performance.

Using a smart watch or tracker

Using a smart watch or step counter can help to get a ballpark estimate of how many calories total you are burning in a day. This can help you determine the right caloric value for consumption based on your health/fitness goals. Of course you want to make sure that the necessary factors for calculating your BMR (basal metabolic rate is accurate)

- Age

- Gender

- Height

- Weight

- Body fat %