Another Great Gift Idea

I was banging around the kitchen yesterday and, as I often do, I threw something on my food scale to see how large it was, only to realize that I'd forgotten to list the food scale on my list of useful gifts for people with diabetes.

The food scale is a wonderful, and very affordable, gift that would be appropriate for anyone with diabetes and anyone who is working on weight-related issues.

Here's the one I use: Escali Primo Digital Multifunctional Scale. I've used mine for three years and have had zero problems with it.

For someone who is trying to lose weight, the food scale might be the difference between endless stall and reaching goal. For someone who has been trying to make fast-acting insulin work at meal times, it might be the difference between unexpected highs or lows and normal blood sugars.

Why? Because diets and insulin only work properly when we count things. For the diet we count calories, grams of carbohydrate, or even [shudder] grams of fat. When we are trying to make fast acting insulin work we need to know how many grams of carbohydrates we are going to be covering with that insulin.

But before we can count a nutrient, we must know the size of the portion we are going to be eating. Nutritional counts are always based on a specific portion size. And here's where the problems arise, because estimating portion size turns out to be much tougher than it looks.

For example, if you look up the standard nutritional information for a "small blueberry muffin", you will learn that it contains 33 grams of carbohydrate" and 259 calories. What you might not have noticed is that this nutritional count is based on a portion size of 66 grams, which is slightly over 2 ounces.

There's only one problem. The smallest blueberry muffin I have ever seen at a bakery and brought home to weigh--the one labeled "mini-muffin"--clocks in at 4 ounces. That's 116 grams--twice the portion size given in the guides.

If you had relied on that nutritional information to figure out what was in that "small" muffin you ate without knowing how large that small muffin actually was, you'd have eaten twice as many calories and twice as much carbohydrate as you thought you were eating. If you were counting calories as part of a weight loss diet, that 259 calories you thought you had eaten were really 518. And if you were trying to cover that muffin with insulin, you'd have used half the insulin you really needed and would have ended up with a nasty high.

Make this kind of mistake a few times each day and there is no way you will lose weight or keep your blood sugars under control.

And that's just what happens when you eat a "small" muffin. If you thought, "I'll just have one little Dunkin Donuts muffin, just this once. How bad can that be?" The answer is, "Plenty bad." When I've weighted those muffins--and most other coffee shop muffins--on my scale I've found they clock in at 7+ ounces, or about 900 calories and almost 120 grams of carbohydrates. The "health food" muffins are even worse as they are denser and may weigh in at 8 ounces or 132 grams of carbohydrate!

All this changes when you buy a food scale that reads in grams and ounces and start weighing your food. You will start to understand what you have really been eating and learn why you've had the problems you've been having with weight and blood sugar control.

If you buy take out food and start weighing it, you'll also learn that the typical restaurant portion of just about anything is always four times what the guides consider a portion. A sterling example is pasta: Weigh out 2 ounces of pasta (Dreamfields will work for this) and cook it up. What you'll end up with is one fifth of what you get when you order a pasta dish at a restaurant.

If you are one of those people who have concluded that eating cheese stalls your low carb diet, weigh the cheese you eat and you may find that it wasn't anything special about cheese that stalled you, only the fact that cheese is so concentrated that you can easily add seven or eight hundred calories to your daily diet in the form of cheese and hardly notice it. After the first few weeks most people find that calories still count on a low carb diet, and cheese is the most concentrated form of calories available after pure oils and fats.

There are some expensive food scales on the market that include food databases, the idea being that you can skip having to go and look up the nutritional value for the food and let the scale work this out for you. But these kinds of scales are a waste of money because their databases are not extensive enough to be useful and, more importantly, you can't add your own recipes and favorite foods to them.

Still this brings up another important point: A food scale is only useful when you combine it with a reliable source of nutritional information, preferably one that can be customized. Many people use the online nutrition tracker http://fitday.com. It is free which is helpful. I personally like the LifeForm shareware product you can download and try from http://lifeform.com. The LifeForm software is a very old design, so it may look a bit clunky, but it gets the job done, the built-in nutritional database is excellent, it is very easy to customize with your own recipes, and most importantly, it is fast and intuitive.

There are other helpful nutritional resources online besides these, and for the computer-phobic, there is always the The Complete Book of Food Counts.

Books that contain nutritional information are particularly helpful for people who are new to dieting or counting carbs. That is because when you are just starting to learn about what is in the food you eat, you can leaf through the pages of a book and look for foods that have the amounts of nutrients that fit the specifications of your chosen diet. Software does not let you do this. After you've gotten a broad overview of what you can and cannot eat, software is more helpful for looking up individual food counts quickly.

While the food scale is a wonderful gift for someone who could use it, it is only appropriate for someone who would appreciate some help in improving their diet success or in making their insulin work better.

As is the case with all diet products, giving a diet-related item to someone who is in denial about a weight or blood sugar problem might end up offending them. The message you want to give with this kind of gift is "Here is something that will help you with a goal I know means a lot to you," NOT "You're so fat, why don't you go on a diet."