Weighing or Measuring your Foods

MichiganGirl67

When measuring or weighing serving sizes do you measure prior to cooking or after? Does it matter? Also do you find it difficult to know if the nutritional content is accurate when searching for foods.

janejellyroll

I weigh my foods raw whenever possible.

I look for entries with multiple verifications. When in doubt, I will also Google search an item to see if the calorie counts I'm seeing match what the database said. It took a bit longer the first couple of weeks, but most of us don't eat THAT many different foods. Once I had a collection of reliable entries, it got much faster.

Ready2Rock206

Weigh all solids - and raw whenever possible. Only use measuring cups for liquids.

pandafoo

This is one of those topics that garners a lot of controversy online. For example, you could cook 10 oz of ribeye but render 2 oz of fat away while grilling it, so you end up eating 8 oz. Then again, if you put the same amount of beef chuck in a pot to make stew, the fat doesn't go anywhere so the calories for uncooked vs cooked are probably similar. Personally, I weigh meats after cooking (unless there's no way to separate the meat from the other ingredients after cooking, like in a chili recipe). For pasta and rice, I weigh beforehand because I don't know how much water they'll absorb.

But it doesn't really matter in the end if you use the MFP database. It contains so many entries for raw and cooked foods that you could find whatever you're eating. If it's for a new item that I haven't searched for before, I check multiple entries and use the one whose calorie count is around the average of all of them.

CurlyCockney

I don't trust the MFP database, so I usually create my own entries using the information on the pack or the store's website, where it states whether the data refers to raw or cooked.

85Cardinals

One thing I found with Checkers/Rally's frozen seasoned french fries, which are delicious btw, is that you have to weigh them while they're frozen to get it right.

Francl27

Raw or cooked, it doesn't really matter, as long as you're using the accurate entry.

I weigh raw when I can, but cooking for a family, it's not always possible, then I use cooked.