A Half Ounce

 A Half Ounce 

Saturday, July 23, 2011

A few years ago, I wanted to lose some weight. I was totally unwilling to track what I ate, so I focused on exercise and training. Of course, the groups that I found dedicated to training told me stuff I didn't want to hear, like, "You can't out-train a crappy diet." 

Still in denial, I tried to clean up my diet a bit without keeping track. One of the things that I ended up doing to save money was take my lunch to work. It had to be cheap, portable, something I would actually eat, and keep for a half day without refrigeration. The healthy part of my most common lunch was a hard boiled egg, a quarter cup of almonds, and a third of a cup of raisins. (Let's not talk about the pop-tarts, okay?) 

Fast forward, and I found SparkPeople. I bought the pictured food scale, which is probably the best $43 I've spent this year. And I weighed my standard almonds that were sitting in baggies waiting to be part of future lunches. They came in at 1.5 or 1.6 ounces. I trimmed them to 1.5 ounces and called it good. 

Another week, and I set a weight goal. Implementing that on the site, my recommended calorie range dropped from the maintenance range I was given when I didn't have a goal. So, how to bring the actual consumption down? Well, the standard serving for almonds on the site seems to be 1 ounce. My sister uses a half ounce. How about if I trim my portion size, since I usually end up munching almonds longer than I want to at lunch?

Thursday I adjusted all my baggies of almonds down to one ounce. Friday the first one ounce bag of almonds went to work in my lunch. Munching the almonds seemed to take a more appropriate length of time, and I didn't even notice the difference in hunger level. Wow.

Let's do the math. A half ounce of almonds (pictured above) is 81.9 calories. 20 work days in a month, times 12 months a year, times 81.9 calories is 19,656 calories. At 3500 calories per pound of fat, that's about 5.6 pounds. 

That's more than half the weight I gained from June 30, 2010 to June 30, 2011. 

I also noticed that the site says there are 24 whole kernels per ounce of almonds. I'm seeing more like 27 or 28; I guess the almonds I buy are a little smaller than the ones used to compute the average. Did I mention that the food scale was the best $43 I've spent this year? 

A half ounce. Not enough almonds to notice on the hunger scale. But enough to make a difference, over the course of a year. 

 Measure. Everything. You. Eat. Absent measurement, you can't make intelligent adjustments, and some of those adjustments are going to be really important.