Advice for Weighing Food

michaela4910

I keep seeing the advice to "weigh your food." I don't understand what this would mean. If my wife makes a casserole for supper. How much should I eat (by weight)? How would I know how many calories, say, 8 oz. of lasagna or 8 oz. of chicken noodle soup is? Thanks, in advance!

macgurlnet

You'll need a food scale and you weigh in grams for solids/semi-solids

What I do is put my bowl/plate on the scale and zero it out. Then I'll add food to it.

Ideally for things like the casserole, you would use the recipe builder here to add the individual ingredients and save it for later reference.

Some folks here will weigh the pan the food will be cooked in, then weigh the food once it's all in the pan and subtract the pan's weight. When they save the recipe, they'll use that number as the number of servings. Then they can portion out whatever they wish and just up the serving size to match the grams.

I hope that helps a little.

~Lyssa

katdarn79

Add all the ingredients calories together for the recipe and divide that total in to the number portions, that's what I do anyway xx

diannethegeek

Useful link: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1290491/how-and-why-to-use-a-digital-food-scale

michaela4910

Thank you all. I already have a scale. I will give this a try. I appreciate you all.

higgins8283801

Myfitnesspal has a recipe builder. I just plug in the amounts of the ingredients I'm using, then tell it how many people it serves. The site generates calories per serving for you. Just make sure you select the amount you're using for the recipe. So for example it will spit out 4oz for ground beef, if you're using 1.18lbs you're going to want to make sure you account for all 1.18lbs.

sgthaggard

Use this site's recipe builder, weigh each of the ingredients, and input the recipe. When done, weigh the final product (less the weight of the dish) - the number of grams is the number of servings you give the recipe. Then weigh your portion - the number of grams in your portion are the number of servings you are eating.

SherryTeach

katdarn79 wrote: »

Add all the ingredients calories together for the recipe and divide that total in to the number portions, that's what I do anyway xx

That is exactly what I have been doing for almost three years and it works very well. I batch cook recipes and portion them out into individual containers. Then I adjust the recipe builder for how many servings I ended up with. In that case, I use my scale to make sure that the same amount of the recipe ended up in each container.

davert123

create recipes in mfp. this holds all the ingredients together. you can then say you have 100gms of it and it alloates the calories and macros. once added the recipe is kept so net time you have it it is there ready for you. good luck

davert123

sgthaggard wrote: »

Use this site's recipe builder, weigh each of the ingredients, and input the recipe. When done, weigh the final product (less the weight of the dish) - the number of grams is the number of servings you give the recipe. Then weigh your portion - the number of grams in your portion are the number of servings you are eating.

sorry didnt see this but this is what i do.. works a treat

higgins8283801

sgthaggard wrote: »

Use this site's recipe builder, weigh each of the ingredients, and input the recipe. When done, weigh the final product (less the weight of the dish) - the number of grams is the number of servings you give the recipe. Then weigh your portion - the number of grams in your portion are the number of servings you are eating.

This!! This is described perfectly

yirara

To be honest the way I do it got a lot more uncertainty but it has worked for me for losing 15kg and maintaining. I'm female, not really young anymore and not particularly large, thus there's less margin of error for me than for many people.

I weigh everything that goes into the dish and build a recipe from that. When we eat I serve the food and try to distribute similar sized serving spoons to both my husband and me. I keep count on how many spoons we both took and how many are still in the pot. I usually have the complete dish in one recipe, but if it's not a one-pot dish then I adjust things like fish to the actual weight or rice according to the spoons we took. Normally you should not use measuring spoons, but as we're both eating from the same pot with a known quantity and same consistency, and I check how much is left I figured I might get away with it.

Disclaimer: if this doesn't work for you then you should really weigh the pans with the prepared food and your plate with your own serving because if it doesn't work it means you're eating more than you think you're serving.

katdarn79

That is exactly what I have been doing for almost three years and it works very well. I batch cook recipes and portion them out into individual containers. Then I adjust the recipe builder for how many servings I ended up with. In that case, I use my scale to make sure that the same amount of the recipe ended up in each container. [/quote]

I batch cook too so when I make curry or chilli let's say I know how many ladles per serving now, but then I do weigh my cooked rice in to portions. Xx

katdarn79

Sorry thought I had quoted Sherryteach!! In my last post!! xx