PERFECT PORTIONS DIGITAL SCALE + NUTRITION FACTS DISPLAY

$49.99 on Amazon

When my friend Pamela over at Redesign Revolution told me about the Perfect Portions Digital Scale, I don’t think I even hesitated for a moment to order one. It was easily the coolest-looking food scale I’d ever seen: not only was it big enough to actually fit larger food items—the one I had before was so small that food usually ended up spilling over the edge—but it also has a built-in nutrition facts database. It tells you exactly how many calories, fat, carbs, protein, cholesterol, sodium, fiber and protein (plus your percent daily value of each) is in the amount you put on the scale. How cool is that? I’ve always had a problem eyeballing portion size, so I figured this would really help me out.

My scale arrived from Amazon a while ago, but since Zombie Prom rehearsals had taken over my life until last weekend, it sat in my room unopened (oops). It’s available in black, white, red, blue and silver, but I was actually so excited to order it that I ended up unthinkingly clicking “Add to Cart” with the default black. Silver probably would have fit better with all the other things in my kitchen, but it’s still a really great scale. Along with a very concise instruction manual, Perfect Portions sends you a booklet with about 2000 food codes, with everything from fruits and veggies to every type/preparation of meat you could imagine. I tried it out with the burgers I made last night for dinner with 90% lean ground beef:

            

There’s a button on the side to switch the weight from grams to ounces, which I did when I tried weighing this apple as a test. I’d bought them in a pre-packaged bag with a printed nutrition label that put each apple at 90 calories. The scale came up with 95, so I’d call that pretty accurate.

I’m really excited to try this out with other non-packaged items, especially for when I’m tracking my food. The one thing I don’t really like about using My Fitness Pal is that there’s a really wide range of calorie counts and nutrition facts for whole foods. Sometimes you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, and even if you do, you’re not sure if it’s totally correct. The Perfect Portions scale will give me all that information so I can enter it myself and get an accurate count of what I’ve eaten.

Have you purchased any new kitchen gadgets recently? Tell us about them!