Healthy Coder

When I started eating right and exercising – I vowed to never be that guy weighing all his food!  I figured that just making healthier choices and exercising was more important than measuring food.  I was right.  I lost a lot of weight with this mentality.

When I started doing the P90X program I realized I had to change my tune.  My goal had changed from losing an unknown amount of weight (probably ~100 lbs) to getting rid of that last little bit.  I  have to be more precise at this point.  I decided that I good scale would be pretty important when preparing meals. My wife was heading out shopping so I asked her to find a scale. "not the cheapest, but not the most expensive" I said as she ran out the door.  Of course her decisions are based purely on appearance and size/profile. So she came back with the most expensive one . Weighing in at 100$ is the Salter Glass Nutritional scale.  Amazon has them for a lot less…but oh well.

Once I started playing with this scale I was pretty stoked. Yah it’s pretty and small and it looks pretty – so my wife was appeased. What I really like is that it comes with a huge internally stored library of foods. If you enter a food code the scale will show you not just the weight of the food, but also the calories and other nutritional information about the food.  Pretty handy.  Oh, and the three AAA batteries were included =).

It’s got a weight capacity of about eleven pounds.  This is plenty for most food weighing scenarios.   Another nice feature of this scale is the ability to change the unit of measurement between all of the biggies (grams, ounces, pounds/ounces, even milliliters).  The P90X recipes are all ounce based, but life in Canada is usually done in grams.  

You can load the scale and zero it out. This is great for adding a measured quantity of something (like mayonnaise) to a bowl of something. For example, when making tuna salad I’ll add the tuna to the bowl, put the bowl on the scale and zero it. Now I can effectively measure the mayo into the bowl without having to mess around with measuring spoons (which steal a small amount of my precious yum!)

I have only two beefs with this scale.  First the buttons, which are kind of like touch screen glass are a little finicky.  Sometimes I have to press the zero button a few times before.  Finally when placing a larger plate on the scale – its difficult to see the screen.

So check out this scale. It’s a must have item if you’re starting P90X IMO…