I never, ever thought I would buy or use a food scale. I had many reasons for this: the scale seemed expensive, it seemed like an excessive/obsessive thing to do, I was afraid that the scale would tell me I needed to eat much, much less than I wanted to, and so on.

But this week I got to the point where I was actually curious. About what my food weighed. And I felt like this was a reasonable reason to go ahead and buy a scale.

I used it for the first time tonight. We were having flank steak. To stay within my points range for the day, I was allotting myself 3 ounces of steak. First, I eyeballed it, using the visual “deck of cards” estimated size. Then I set up the scale and weighed. Hah. My portion weighed FOUR ounces. I was all, “How about that.” It looked like a very small amount. I was not upset, but I was surprised. Hmph. No wonder.  I started substituting and taking away until it read 3.0 oz. What I ended up with was two strips of steak.  Normally I can easily put away eight strips, no problem. So yeah. Portion control has definitely been my Achilles heel.

But my dinner was great. I had the steak, plus an extremely delicious mache salad with blush wine vinaigrette and slivered almonds and feta crumbles. Mache is a very delicate, round-leafed lettuce, almost like clover. It’s delicious.  I also had a fancy-shmancy shrimp and avocado cocktail that I got from Biggest Loser trainer Jillian’s book. It was yummy. All very yummy. And in the end I was quite satisfied, almost fullish.

How about THAT. I actually used a food scale, and the world did not come to an end.