Weighing food

patslitzker

How inaccurate is it to weigh cooked food? I know it's better to weigh it prior to cooking but for my chicken I usually bake a whole weeks worth and meal prep for the week.

aflane

I do the same when I make a turkey breast for the week. I weigh mine after cooking. I'm not eating it raw.

CafeRacer808

The degree of inaccuracy depends, in large part, on cooking time. The longer a piece of protein cooks, the more water and fat is lost.

In your case, I think the best thing to do would be to create a recipe for your baked chicken. Weigh your chicken raw prior to cooking and edit the recipe to reflect the weight of the bird you're cooking that week. The recipe builder will then recalculate the calories for that recipe based on the new weight you entered.

If you've already cooked it prior to weighing raw, use a "cooked" or "baked" chicken entry from the food database.

aflane wrote: »

I do the same when I make a turkey breast for the week. I weigh mine after cooking. I'm not eating it raw.

The fact that you're not eating it raw doesn't matter. A piece of chicken will have the same calories when raw or cooked. The problem is the logging. A piece of cooked chicken will weigh less than when raw, meaning the calories/gram for that cooked chicken will be higher than raw. If you use a raw database entry for cooked chicken (and I'm not saying you do), then your caloric intake will be inaccurate.

Rogstar

It works fine for me. I usually cook up bags of frozen chicken and ground beef to have throughout the week and just weigh what I eat that day. There are going to be variances based on how much water was actually cooked out of the meat but the difference is relatively minor compared to when it was raw.

You just have to make sure that the entry you use is specified "cooked" and how you cooked it. Usually there will be entries for roasted, poached, baked, grilled, etc...and note that those entries should be for just the chicken itself. You'd have to add any butter/oil or sauces you may have used separately.

patslitzker

Sorry I didn't specify. I buy packs of chicken breast. When cooked they're usually all roughly about 10-12 oz. I marinate them in fat free Italian dressing but I measure that separately.

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