I am amazed and disappointed at how rubbish I am at eyeballing the weight of food! For example cheese I have weighed hundreds of pieces aiming for 20 grams. Sheez I can easily be out by 5 grams. Vegetables and fruit even worse. Need to weigh every single thing to be sure. It is more or less a habit now but I kind of thought I would have a better handle on it by now. It certainly shows how important it is as can easily be (weigh) out estimating. Think I will move my scales to a more accessible position.

Hiya, esw!

Personally, I can't "eyeball" amounts... so I weigh everything. It only takes seconds... (Imma OCD ~ self diagnosed!)

As always, wishing you continued success on your journey!

I'm not bad at eyeballing, but I still weigh everything
Like Jo, I have to be precise.
I have scales that will weigh down to a hundredth of a gram....

Listen, I don't want to brag, but I can nail cheese slices to within a couple of grams pretty much every time. Everything else is a total crapshoot, and because I'm a big overeater, I need to weigh and measure all the time.

I weigh what I don't measure. If I stop for a couple of months, and go back, I'll be surprised once again at how small a four or five ounce piece of meat is.

I'm pretty good at eyeballing too but I still weigh and measure everything. It keeps me honest.

Jean

I use my scale periodically to re-adjust my eyeballs. Scale sits right in the open where I prepare food. I think that's helpful as it's not any sweat to use it when I think I need it.

I am always surprised how LITTLE fat weighs and like teaser, how MUCH meat weighs. I'm glad I don't measure fat or meat often, just mostly vegetables and calculate in my head their net carbs per 100g

I'm also grateful WHAT I eat is so consistent and limited - that's an "easy button" for sure.

I never felt like shelling out the money for a kitchen scale so I always eyeballed using guides like at the bottom of this page:

https://img.webmd.com/dtmcms/live/w...ntrol-guide.pdf

And while doing Atkins induction I would just use bowls for my veggies that were exactly 1 cup for my dinner veggies, or two cups for my salad veggies and so on.

You get good at it, after a while. Plus I allowed myself flexibility - if I cooked too much broccoli for me and my husband, and I felt like eating the last couple florets, I would just have a little less the next day.

The replies show how important weighing and measuring is. Like most of you I am amazed at how heavy a small amount of food can be. Moved scales to more prominent position which will make measuring hot food easier. Not only does it give accuracy but it gives me confidence that I am not overeating. My brain is starting to accept that I really don't need a big plate of food, quality rather than quantity.

One of the biggest fails for me has always been having to formally weigh and measure food before I eat it. When I was a little girl, my mother followed Weight Watchers and had a tiny scale on the kitchen counter and weighed her cheese slices, etc. before eating them. For me, it always spelled tedium and self-deprivation. However, adding numbers in my head has always been second nature to me, and I've been scrutinizing nutrition labels since I was a teenager. I use vintage cups and bowls for measuring my food portions as they were not supersized. A cup is 6-8 ounces, and a bowl is about 18 ounces to the very rim. Dessert/custard dishes are about 3-4 ounces. I use them to serve myself. I also use measuring spoons for a tablespoon, a teaspoon, etc. I don't weigh anything.

I also tend to eat single-serving type foods from nature (eggs, strawberries, radishes, grape tomatoes for example) or portioned-out packaged foods from the supermarket (frozen fish fillets, chicken cutlets, burgers, etc.).

I'm decidedly type B when it comes to most things, so I'd say eyeballing and light measuring/approximating work well for me.

I measure mostly to target a high level of ketosis. More to the point would be measuring ketones, but for now, just measuring protein and carbs puts me in a place where most people's blood ketones would be high, I just have to hope that I count as most people in this respect.

One thing I don't always measure is butter, if I've eaten all the anti-ketogenic food I want to for the day and I'm peckish, sometimes I'll slice a square off the end of the block and eat it with mustard.