More than Meets the Eye
- justinrgtyler
- Oct 13, 2023
- 2 min read
LET'S TALK ABOUT PEANUT BUTTER.... and eyeing up portions without weighing...
I usually like to grab a "cheeky spoonful" of peanut butter as a pre-dinner snack while I'm prepping/cooking because I'm typically bloody hungry by the evening, especially if I've trained. I've been communicating to clients about why it's so important to weigh your food to understand portions, weight and the calories being consumed.
Now I'm pretty confident in my ability to guess the weight and how many calories are in a range of various foods from several years of experience. BUT here's the thing, I decided to check how much I was actually having where I have recently got back into tracking mode, where I'm methodically trying to build muscle over the next 4 months without getting super tubby as I have previous winters so I thought it was a good time to do this.
Anyways, my usual spoonful of peanut butter, turned out to be 3 times heavier/larger than the serving size I believed I was having (30g versus 10g) meaning I've been underestimating the calories by about 200 calories with every (now not so) cheeky spoonful.
It's crazy how visibly small a 10g serving of peanut butter actually is and I tell people about it all the time including condiments like ketchup, mayonnaise, salad dressings, butter. But, despite my knowledge, I slowly started to get a bit lazy and overly generous with eyeballing my food portions over time.
The bottom line is, you don't have to keep counting calories forever to lose weight. But, if you're struggling with your weight loss journey, feeling like you're stuck, and not getting results, it might be worth tracking your calories and weighing your food portions for a little while. After all we can't track what's not measured. It's natural for us to start guessing portion sizes over time, but some foods are trickier to estimate accurately. Sometimes, it's good to remind ourselves of what serving sizes look like!
A few days of keeping an eye on your calorie intake and weighing your food can often reveal valuable insights that, deep down, we might have known were true but didn't want to admit. King culprit over here!