The following post is sponsored by FitFluential LLC on behalf of The Orange Chef.
I love, love, love technology and all the ways we can utilize it to live a happy and healthy life! When FitFluential asked me to review The Orange Chef Company’s Prep Pad I was so excited to learn all the ways this smart scale could help me to conceptualize my portion sizes and to eat a more accurate calorie count.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the queen of eyeballing my portions. I’ll grab a handful of almonds as a snack, add a splash of creamer to my coffee, and top my turkey burger with a squirt of ketchup. While it may not seem like much, calories add up and by the end of the week they really could make a huge difference in my body weight.
The past two weeks I’ve been able to use the Prep Pad given to me by The Orange Chef Co. and the iPad stand I purchased myself. Instantly I realized how many extra calories I’ve been eating each week by not weighing and measuring the foods that I eat. The Prep Pad has not only helped me to eat a more accurate number of calories but it has shown me how fun building a healthy dish can be.
The Prep Pad food scale, which syncs to the iOS app Countertop through the iPad3 or newer, allows you to add food to the platform and instantly determine the calorie count of your exact amount of food. When you first set up your account through the app, the program will determine your recommended calorie intake based on your height, weight, level of activity, and goal. From there you can determine your meal balance, adjusting your carbohydrate, fat, and protein goals for each day.
With your goals established, you can now use the Prep Pad to create individual meals and to see an overview of your macro and micro nutrients, vitamins, and minerals of your meal.
The first thing you do using a container (bowl in this case) is to place your bowl on the scale. You will then click container in order to weigh your bowl and to zero out the scale. With an empty container, you can then add foods to your dish. If you’re weighing solid foods, you can simply just add your foods directly to the Prep Pad.
For breakfast one morning last week I decided to make a yogurt bowl with Chobani Greek vanilla yogurt, blueberries, and Quaker Oat Squares. The first thing I did was to measure out 1 cup of vanilla yogurt as it was the serving size on the container of Chobani. I leveled off the cup and was shocked when I added it to the scale. Although the serving size was 1 cup (227g), the yogurt came out to 237g on the scale. Even though I measured the cup of yogurt, the scale made me realize that my 1 cup measure wasn’t accurate.
I also learned that using the barcode scanner through the app was much easier than searching for the product through the search bar. The product didn’t come up right away when I entered it into the search bar but then it came up through the barcode scanner.
I then repeated the steps with each ingredient. I added the blueberries to the yogurt, added the product, and then moved on to the Quaker Oat Squares. The end result was a total picture of my entire meal.
The overview, which is just a snapshot of my breakfast, shows my macro and micro nutrients for my meal (the inner ring) and its comparison to my daily goals (the outer loop). In the middle of the circle is your meal’s “Balance Score”, which helps you to see how close your meal is to your nutritional goals. This meal for example scored a 14 because it was carbohydrate heavy.
Using the Prep Pad these past two weeks has helped me to learn more about the foods I’m eating and which foods are carbohydrate heavy. As I tend to lean this way, the Prep Pad has helped me to find new ways to add more protein to my diet.
After completing a meal, the Countertop app allows you to snap a picture of your masterpiece, which I think is such a fun way to connect with the foods you’re eating and to share it with your social media community.
You can save your photo, attach it to your meal, and then send it out via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Evernote, and/or e-mail.
My breakfast was so enjoyable that morning, not only because it tasted amazing, but also because I knew exactly how many calories I was eating instead of guessing.
With over 350,000 foods in its database, The Orange Chef Prep Pad has been an amazing tool to help me make more informed decisions in the kitchen. As I always say, if technology can help you to live a happier and healthier life, why not take full advantage of it? The Prep Pad is an amazing tool and well worth the investment. It has truly opened my eyes to how many extra calories I’ve been eating by eyeballing.
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