The lazy dieter

SEAFOODMAN

you still should weigh it, the labels are not always accurate.....some have more calories and some have less.

Alatariel75

I've been thinking about this, I don't really care if my home cooked meals aren't as accurate (which I still say they are, eithin reasonable parameters) - I cook, I eat, I lose weight, why worry? If I'm over-estimating, well I make that up the times I do splurge. If I'm under-estimating, it certainly isn't doing me any harm. And I get to eat my tasty, freah home cooked meals.

If you like, and are happy eating, frozen meals and packet food - go for it. But if you're compromising on taste and satisfaction because you need the labels, you're doing yourself a disservice.

SnuggleSmacks

Before I got a food scale, I found it easier to eat frozen meals and canned soup just because the calorie counts were so readily available. I missed cooking, though, so I had to get a food scale. Now I enter ingredients in as I prep them, or else write them down on the memo app on my phone to input later, and it takes a lot less time that I would have thought.

I do still sometimes find myself going to chain restaurants as opposed to local because of the availability of information on their websites, but I'm trying to break that habit.

rbfdac

IMO- the lazy, LC way is awesome as far as effort required goes, but those things absolutely do not fill me up! I much prefer to eat tons of low calorie food and actually get full, even if it takes me longer to log it and prepare it.

VeryKatie

I frequented Tim Horton's for nearly every meal this week and it was easier haha.

chelseafxx

hhmb8k wrote: »

patriciapowerswilliamson wrote: »

To the poster of this thread, if you can also include fresh organic fruit and salads (veggies) with these meals, a green fresh salad, it would help.

I wish you all the best.

Thanks.

...and you're absolutely correct. If I did only eat a Healthy Choice frozen meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner it would only average out to about 900 cal a day. So, plenty of room to add some fruits and veggies. But then you re-open that can of worms about how you track your intake for the stuff that doesn't have a barcode slapped on it.

I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion that all those guys and gals that only eat fresh, non-processed home cooked food, really don't bother with keeping track of calories or nutritional content at all (or at best they are completely guessing most of the time).

I kinda get the sense that they are really just ballparking it. Like guessing that their caloric intake for the day was roughly somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 calories (uhm, give or take about 1,000 calories in error one way or the other).

I can't prove that is the case, just a sneaking suspicion.

Actually many people take the extra time to weigh everything. One thing in my diary for tomorrow for example says 3/4 cup of pasta. But, the side of the box says its weight in grams I think it's 56 g so I'm going to weigh it in grams. Give us OCD people some credit!! We put a lot of extra time into weighing our foods and we ARE accurate! Just because I didn't take the extra unnecessary time to search for the exact same MFP database entry that lists it in grams rather than "3/4 cup" doesn't mean I didn't weigh it in grams still.

lyzistrata

hhmb8k wrote: »

Alatariel75 wrote: »

Nope. When I make something, every ingredient is weighed and tracked, and then the portions are measured before I eat them. It just takes *drumroll*... not being lazy.

Using a food scale along with USDA or equivalent confirmed nutritional info (the same your frozen food companies use to put the labels on their food), it's just as accurate as a packet. They don't have scientists testing every product, they just weigh up the ingredients and do the maths, just like us home cookers. There's no magic in nutritional labels on processed food.

I believe you...



in theory.


In practice, I think we cook very differently. Either that or I stand by what I said about the wildly inaccurate guesstimates most people use.

Do you ever add a dash of salt to the pot (and never forget to add that to the tally of total sodium)? What about when you season your food before you cook it by sprinkling salt and pepper over the meat and 40-50% of the seasoning never sticks to the food at all?

Example: A pinch of salt is roughly 360 mg of sodium according to Google.

That is about 3 times MORE than the total sodium in my entire healthy choice meal I had for dinner. Miss one pinch of salt and you are now wildly inaccurate in your nutritional calculations.

Example: A tablespoon of generic Olive Oil has 120 calories and roughly 22% of your daily fat according to Google.

If you use "several" tablespoons of Olive Oil to coat the bottom of your pan to sear a chicken breast, do you include the total amount of Olive oil used, even if most of it stays behind in the pan and not on the chicken breast? Or do you have NASA grade scales accurate to a millionth of an ounce and weigh the pan before cooking and after cooking making adjustments for temperature and pressure changes in the room to calculate how much oil (or butter or margarine or whatever) is left behind and then deduct that from the amount put into the pan to determine the amount on the food...


OK, OK, I'm being silly.

It's getting late and I don't want to get too serious.

But the way I like to cook, I use seasoning and condiments, etc. All silliness aside, I don't think I can cook that way and have an accurate measurement of sodium content (for example) let alone total calories. So, healthy cooking means cooking without salt and olive oil or using condiments, right? Is everything cooked Sou Vide in a warm water bath without seasonings so you can use the USDA values provided online for a generic chicken breast?

Please prove me wrong and dispel my fears or teach me a better way to do it. Actually that is what this is all about. I'm not trying to argue or throw around wild accusations of sloppy dietary miscalculations to sully your culinary reputation. I'm just really trying to figure out a better way to do it than the way I'm doing it now. Tips and advice are not only welcome, that's what I'm asking for.

You are my new favorite, because this is exactly how I feel about measuring everything while cooking.

mgibbons22

I eat the same thing every day. Grilled pork, skinless boneless chicken, steak, or fish. Half a container of Steam-In-Bag vegetables. Brown rice. Clean as can be, tasty, good leftovers. When I log, I just log as pork, regardless if it's shoulder, tenderloin, chops. Steak is logged as steak, regardless of the cut. Same for chicken and fish. Logging takes seconds, not minutes.

SnuggleSmacks

I would be so bored if I ate the same thing every day. I have very few staples because I switch them up so much and try to eat seasonally. I love to try new things, or new combinations or methods of old things, so that just wouldn't work for me.