If you care about music, the iPod is your must-have toy. If you care about TV, an HDTV is your must-have toy. If you care about nutrition, your diet, or your weight, a digital food scale is your must-have toy.

When you turned on your first HDTV and saw the difference, you probably thought “Wow, this is going to be awesome.” Well, you’ll have that same thought when you get yourself a digital food scale and use it for the first time. It just makes the life of a person who gives a crap about what they are putting into their body so much easier and, not to mention, so much more accurate.

No more guessing how many servings you are eating (is it 1? 2? maybe 0.75? 1.38?) and then doing the math to adjust the nutrition facts per serving to the serving you actually ate (let’s see, 1 serving has X calories, and I’m probably eating around A.BC servings, so that’s… uhhh… borderline math homework).

And with a digital food scale? There is no more “probably” and there is no more math. Now you just need to:

  1. Turn the food scale on.
  2. Put the food on it.
  3. Read the weight.

Hard work, ain’t it? And after that just:

  1. Come to a Calorie Counter.
  2. Search for your food.
  3. Select grams or ounces (depends which one your scale uses) from the drop-down menu.
  4. Enter in the weight of your food as the serving size.

That’s it. Instant nutrition facts customized to your EXACT serving.

And no, you don’t need to sit around all day weighing every piece of food you put into your mouth. You certainly can (and at first you’ll probably want to… it’s fun and interesting) but you certainly don’t need to. In fact, pretty soon you’ll start to memorize the calorie content (and other nutrition facts) of the foods you tend to eat on a regular basis and therefore have no need to keep weighing them over and over. You’ll just remember X amount of this food = X calories.

So yeah, by using a food scale you can pretty much expect to develop magical nutrition memory abilities. Not quite as cool as x-ray vision or flying, but still pretty cool.

Let’s see, what else might you want to know? Oh, digital food scales are small and cheap. The one I use (Salter 2001 5-Pound Microtronic Kitchen Scale) costs $29.99 and is about 1-2 inches thick, and a little bit wider than a CD. I’ve used it pretty much daily for over a year with no problems, and only needed to change the battery once (just last month, actually).

You will definitely not see me recommending many things on here (99.9% of all diet/nutrition/fitness related products are complete junk) but, in my opinion, there is nothing more useful to someone paying attention to their diet than a digital food scale.

Well, except maybe for a really pretty web site that allows you to look up your food’s nutrition facts. ;-)