If you’re looking for easy ways to improve your daily diet without changing what you’re eating completely, then weighing ingredients—particularly meat—is a great place to start. Weighing allows you to easily control portion size to make sure that you’re not having too much of a good thing. This way, you can still have all of the foods you love without going overboard, promoting a healthier lifestyle overall without any quick fix diet fads.
Keeping in line with our mission to let you cook what you love, only healthier, we make it easy to make sure you’re eating the right portion sizes on all your favorite grilled foods. With just a kitchen scale and the grilling chart in your Use & Care manual, you can measure out healthy portions of your food to ensure you’re not over indulging.
Although you see conflicting opinions on whether to you should weigh before cooking or after, we recommend that you always weigh before cooking and adjust the amount by 1 oz over whatever portion you are trying to get. In general, meat will lose about one ounce of weight during cooking, so if you want a healthy 4 oz. portion, you weigh out 5 ounces of precooked meat. All of the weights listed in the cooking chart provide the precooked weight you should be measuring out to get a healthy portion.
This example helps show how to accurately measure a burger patty:
- Shape the uncooked ground beef into your patties.
- Place each patty on your kitchen scale to ensure the patty weighs roughly 5 ounces.
- Set weighed patties on your preheated George Foreman grill and cook to desired doneness.
- Once cooking is finished, you can weigh again to ensure you’ve gotten close to the portion you were trying to achieve. In this case, the cooked portion should now be about 4 oz. This step is particularly good if you’re actually dieting and not simply trying to eat healthier.
On the subject of actual dieting if you’re trying to lose weight, a good rule of thumb is that your portions should be about 1-2 ounces less than a regular healthy cooking portion. For burgers, the precooked patty should weigh 4 ounces, instead of 5. For chicken, the precooked weight should be 6 ounces, instead of 8.
Now, not everyone has a kitchen scale on-hand in their kitchen—or maybe you have one, but you’re strapped for time. You can use the rule that a healthy portion is generally the size of a deck of playing cards. This won’t be an exact healthy portion measure, but it’s better than simply hoping that you have a good portion size.