This is long, sorry. TL;DR: PLEASE measure your food carefully to really understand how much to eat. Just eyeballing the food isn't enough--newbies like me will underestimate the calories on the plate and end up gaining weight as a result.
I'm sure this will be absolutely no surprise to seasoned veterans on their weight loss journey, but I'm a clueless newbie and it was shocking to me, so I wanted to post this here as well, just in case someone else can benefit from my naivete.
I've been trying to lose weight, but I haven't really had much success yet. Other posts here have been very helpful. I understand now that 90% of losing weight is simply eating less calories than I burn each day.
My idea was to keep eating the foods I love (like Panda Express, for example. I know, I know...) but in smaller quantities. I went to the Panda Express website and printed out their nutrition guide. This is the guide that lists all their side dishes, main courses, etc, and shows how many calories are in each dish, along with other nutritional information.
Previously, I thought I had a GREAT eye for portion sizes, and I thought I could reliably judge the amount of calories on my plate just by eyeballing the portions. This is where everything was going wrong.
After getting a perfectly normal Panda Express lunch (fried rice, orange chicken, kung pao chicken), I took it all home and got out my new kitchen scale. I had my printed copy of the Panda Express nutritional guide, and I used the kitchen scale to measure out the food, according to weight, and the nutritional guide.
I was blown away. I had been messing up SO badly. I wanted to eat 500 calories for my meal, as measured by the scale. But this turned out to be like 5 bites of food. I thought I had messed up my measurements, but I triple-checked and it was right.
It seems that the people working at Panda Express who actually serve the food tend to put on MUCH, much more food than the serving size mentioned in the nutritional guide. For example, 500 calories of Orange Chicken is about 5.5 ounces. I put that amount of chicken on a plate and it's a TINY amount of chicken, it feels crazy. The amount of chicken that they put on my plate at the store was almost 11 ounces!
If I had eaten the plate as it was given to me at the store, it would have been almost 2500 calories. Just the one plate. I know they were probably trying to do me a solid by really heaping rice and chicken on my plate, but I had NO idea how many calories were actually on that plate.
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