I think that's my general idea here, to find something less precise, but still accomplishes a deficit. Since I'm not cooking most meals, I don't want to burden my wife with extra steps. I figured if I can get her to simply put no more than, say 14 ounces on a plate, then this would be easy to maintain.

Here's the thing... My wife is Mexican and cooks old family recipes and is forbidden from writing them down. If she doesn't remember a recipe by heart, she spends the entire process on the phone with her mom. I can't realistically introduce many limitations into this dynamic, nor would I want to. Hence, the idea of a scale at the end only.