Meat weight when cooking

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digidoomed
digidoomed Posts: 151 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Are you supposed to weigh food raw or cooked when calculating serving calories? For example, if I am making chicken, do I cut the piece and weigh it first, or do I wait after I've finished cooking them to weigh for logging

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  • abirdintherain
    abirdintherain Posts: 73 Member
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    Weighing raw is more accurate; log as the raw chicken entry or whatever the nutrition label on your chicken package says. If you weigh after cooked, just make sure to find a USDA entry that specifies that it's cooked the way you cooked it (chicken - cooked, baked for example)
  • Nikion901
    Nikion901 Posts: 2,467 Member
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    This is a question that pops up often ... and I think you can do it either way ... try putting in "raw" in the food database search box or however it was cooked ... "boiled, roasted, baked", etc.

    Generally, meat is weighed raw per serving and then cooked. However when I cook a whole roast or chicken, I look for database hits that have it in it's cooked state ...
  • HCGonzalezJr87
    HCGonzalezJr87 Posts: 6 Member
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    Most nutritional entries are for raw foods. You can weigh it either way. For example, if cooking a 4oz serving of ground beef from a 16oz pack measure it raw. If you cook it in bulk and want to do a 4oz servings, weigh all of the cooked meat and divide it by 4 to get your cooked serving size. What you don't want to do is weigh out 4oz of cooked meats and log the raw nutritional values in MFP. You will end up under estimating your calories and over eating.

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