Shoot Up or Put Up

And lo! the scales fell from my eyes

During the summer last year we went round to some friends of ours for a dinner party. Yes, a dinner party – now that I have reached my thirties, I no longer have the desire to frequent sweaty nightclubs of a Saturday night, downing expensive, sticky drinks and being much, much too close to the dripping unwashed masses.

So being unrelenting and incurably middle class, I now spend Saturday nights with friends, supping fine wines and discussing the issues of the day (I say that, but this particular dinner party ended up being somewhat rowdy, with broken glasses and minor chaos – we eventually left our host in the early hours with an uncontrollable bout of booze-induced hiccups).

Anyway, I digress. I bring up the whole dinner-party thing because I noticed on that particular evening that our host had a rather fancy-pants set of scales which gave you the various nutritional values of whatever you happened to be weighing. I saw that it did carbohydrates and duly lodged this diabetic-friendly piece of information away in the recesses of my brain.

So it came to pass that when our crappy set of TESCO scales gave up the ghost (thanks TESCO – that was £12 well spent, I think not) I finally fulfilled my ambition and purchased a set of said fancy-pants scales.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I religiously carb count. I mean religiously in that I strictly carb count about as frequently as I attend church (once on Christmas Eve and the occasional wedding). Most of the time I fly solo and make an educated guess for carb contents and insulin doses. But every once in a while I properly check and log everything for a week or so – sort of like a diabetes refresher course – to check I’m doing things well.

It’s therefore when I’m doing a periodic refresher that these scales really come into their own. Can’t be bothered to work out the carb content of your glass of breakfast orange juice? Easy – just bung the glass on the fancy scales, hit 878 (the code for orange juice), fill up with orange and hey presto! up comes the carb content for that exact amount of fruity juicy goodness. Yum!

Using the internal memory, you can quickly tot up the total carb content of your entire breakfast (which is usually, for me, a pint of heavy claret and a whole roast pheasant and trimmings) and log and inject accordingly.

So while not entirely world-shattering, my new fancy-pants scales are actually quite good with helping me to carb count. More importantly, they look really cool. So – in summary – they’re probably a worthwhile spend of £36. If you care, my Salter “Nutri-weigh Slim” electronic scale can be found on the John Lewis web site; if you don’t care, what technology-of-the-future do you use to help carb count?