When starting out people often ask how they can tell how many calories are in different ingredients. Well, put simply, you need to weigh it.
Probably one of the most complex tasks for doing Keto is weighing your food. But let’s be honest, this is a good thing as this is as hard is it gets to improve your life!
When you are starting out, you really need to weigh your ingredients, being strict and consistent. Don’t skip anything. The benefit of doing this early on is that you will eventually need to do it less (or even not at all) as you will develop a sought of ‘seventh sense’ when it comes to amounts of ingredients and staples you are using in your cooking. But, this can take some time and some prefer to just always weigh!
So, to help be successful on Keto, you need some digital kitchen scales. They are relatively inexpensive, most department stores will sell them for less than $20.
There are plenty of options available on Amazon.
Here are some tips for how I used my scales:
- It is a good idea to clean your scales regularly, especially after meat, thankfully they are usually easy to just wipe down with a cloth.
- If you are weighing powders or liquids using a measuring cup or bowl, you can turn on the scales with the measuring cup/bowl already on and reset the scales to zero. This way when you add ingredients you will only be measuring the ingredients and not the utensil you are using. Seems straight forward, but hey I had to learn.
- When I was following recipes, I would weigh everything and then get the macro nutrient breakdowns from Google. Usually just googling terms like ‘chicken calories’ would reveal the macros per 100g. I would use this as my guide to work out the totals. I did this often when I was modifying recipies, especially as often I was using different brands/blends of ingredients.