Weighing food newbie

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mac5322
mac5322 Posts: 4 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hello all just starting to weigh my food. Only one problem. l don't know if i weigh it before or after cooking? Thank You for reading and helping out is awesome!

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  • SherryTeach
    SherryTeach Posts: 2,836 Member
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    It depends on how the entry you are using. When I build a recipe, I use the weight of the ingredients raw. But I have broiled a hamburger, noticed that the raw weight was 3 ounces and the cooked weight 2.5. I can find an entry for both, so it doesn't really matter in that case.
  • daniebanks
    daniebanks Posts: 179 Member
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    i weight it pending on how im eating it.. ie ill weigh chicken cooked
  • RodaRose
    RodaRose Posts: 9,562 Member
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    As a general rule, measure and weigh raw.
  • BuckyArden33
    BuckyArden33 Posts: 146 Member
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    before cooking
  • MKyri91
    MKyri91 Posts: 2 Member
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    I think it's best to weigh everything raw (ensuring you're using the pre-cooked macros), besides protein e.g., chicken which loses some of its (water) weight during cooking. There's no point wasting your macro budget on what is essentially water.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
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    RodaRose wrote: »
    As a general rule, measure and weigh raw.

    This. If you can't--estimating for cooked food or you have bone in meat you remove from the bone after cooking--then you should use an entry that is for cooked food.

    For example, the best entries for whole foods are usually the USDA entries that MFP input that have no asterisk. The format for meat is typically something like: "chicken-breast, meat only, raw" or "chicken-breast, meat and skin, cooked, roasted." It's important to choose the entry that corresponds to the state of your food when you weighed it, as otherwise the weight could be distorted by water lost in cooking. My impression is that lots of newbies weigh after cooking but use a raw entry (or one that does not specify, which is normally for raw) and thus undercount the weight of the meat, since it shrinks during cooking but does not lose calories. (A 4 oz serving is not 4 oz when cooked.)

    On the other hand, lots of people assume the serving size for rice or pasta is cooked when it's typically raw, and so it's much larger in reality, as it expands during cooking.

    The USDA entries don't include bones or, for fruit, the portions that you don't eat, like pit or banana peel.

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