Calculating Recipes

MzCara148

Yea or Nay?

I am doing CICO and pretty much eating whatever as long as I have enough calories. And by that I mean having some of the casserole I made for the family, all weighed out, not eating a whole bag of chips and nothing else for the day.

It is SUCH a pain though. Weighing out all the ingredients, figuring out how much a serving weighs - it is easier to just eat a salad, that's for sure.

So I was wondering - who still eats with their family? Or is everyone making their families eat "clean"?

bigghunny

It is a struggle. My family are all on the "skinny" side. They eat pretty much anything with no weight gain. Uggg. I pretty much make dinner for them, than i weigh count measure my food seperatly. Wish there was an easier way...lol

Dad4Myla

Nope, i completely eat whatever everyone is having. Now I do most of the cooking in our household so I know what goes into everything. And I create a ton of recipes on MFP. Just so when we have spaghetti and meatballs, I have it in my recipes just the way I made it. And I eat only what I have available for calories. Sometimes, I swap out a ingredient with a healthier option like turkey meatballs. And sometimes I don’t. It’s a give and take.

MzCara148

I am always trying to streamline but it is such a pain.

I cooked in my instant pot today so I weighed my interior pot before I started. Then weighed each ingredient as it went it. Then I weighed the full pot after the food was cooked, decided about how many calories I wanted to "spend" on that dish and figured out how many servings I would have to say the recipe serves to come out with that number of calories, then subtracted the weight of the empty pot from the weight of the pot with cooked dinner in it, then divided that weight by the number of servings to figure out how much to weigh out for my serving.

And the next time I make the same exact dish? If I am feeling uncertain that I put EXACTLY the same amount of every ingredient - for example if I can't get a package of meat that is exactly the same that I used last time - I will repeat the same process. Of if maybe I am afraid I did it wrong last time I will do it again.... or it's a full moon.... or whatever.

Oh - and I made noodles with dinner so I weighed out a dry serving and cooked mine in a separate pot. I made note of the cooked weight so if I am brave and make those exact same noodles again I MAY just weigh out cooked noodles, but in reality I will probably just cook mine in a separate pot again.

And around it goes, LOL!!! I think I loose weight because it's easier to just not eat.

bigghunny

OMG....that would drive me absolutely crazy...lol I wouldn't want to eat either. But that's just me

gin_rummy

I don't have kids to worry about but me and my skinny husband are eating the same. Now to be clear, he is not skinny because he eats healthily. He always ate far more junk than I did but he is blessed with an incredible metabolism that just burns it all off. Lucky b@st@rd!

Now - he still doesn't need to worry about what he's eating from a weight perspective, but he has joined MFP so that whoever cooks can log recipes and I can get an accurate calorie count. We don't bother logging herbs and spices, which usually form the longest part of the ingredients list for us - we're talking single digit calories across the whole dish, it's not worth the effort.

And of course, we only have to create the recipe once! Even if it's slightly different next time - MFP allows you to amend the recipe very easily and you can even do a 'save as' under a different name so you can keep both versions. My recipe tab is full of stews/curries of the same kind that I batch cook and freeze so that I'll have the exact count for that version (because a lot of my stews are made up and depend on what I have in stock!)

I don't go to the extent of weighing out the portions, but I know I'm eating roughly half of what we've cooked, for me it's good enough. And if he wants a bit extra he can have a piece of bread to mop up the sauce or eat more fruit after dinner. (He also has much more substantial lunches than I do but we're both at our workplaces so that's no bother.) A key thing for me is to work out the calories in the recipe before I eat my lunch - if dinner is high calorie, I can reduce what I eat at lunch or what I snack on to compensate.

And sometimes yes, husband will eat more of a component of dinner - generally whatever 'carb' we are having. Last night was a middle-eastern meal served with wholemeal flatbread - I had one flatbread, he had two.

bmeadows380

yeah, I've built in a ton of recipes, but I'm not nearly that dedicated! I'll weigh meats and things not in a container, but otherwise, I'll just use the readings in the database, add all the ingredients together (and like gin_rummy, I usually don't bother counting spices), divide by the servings size I want and call it done - I don't weight the finished product. I will ladle soups out into another bowl and count how many ladle fulls I have to figure out how many should be in a serving, but that's about it.

Mellykay88

I eat most of my dinners with my mom (single and no kids so why not?). For lunch and breakfast I weigh things, etc. But dinner is much more tricky. I put recipes into MFP and ask her what she used in her recipe to get as close as possible. For me, weighing every single thing I eat is just not sustainable. I know some people swear by it and I have used the scale to see what an actual serving looks like and that helps me to get my servings as accurate as possible.

MzCara148

I am going to have to figure out what "normal" will look like for me. I always do well when I keep a super tight rein on my logging. I have gone as far as bringing measuring cups in my purse to restaurants. I know that won't be sustainable in the long run but in the past as soon as I loosen the reins a bit it all falls to pieces.

cassie9393

I do pretty much the exact same thing as @bmeadows380 with weighing some items like meat, and I'll do pasta like spaghetti, but then I'm more about having a certain number of portions. If you know you're having about a fifth, you can say the recipe serves 5 and get your count. I do a lot of one-pot meals and will scoop them out across dishes so that I know each dish has 2 scoops or whatever so that it's a specific number of portions, but that only works if your family is okay with you serving up their meals! When we're trying to lose as much a we in this group are, I think we can't get too bogged down with each and every calorie. Your values might not be 100.00% perfect, but as long as they're close, you'll be able to lose and be dieting to live, not living to diet.

fatoldladyonamission

I’m the only veggie in my house so I weigh out all my own and hubby and daughter look after their own. Occasionally daughter will have some of my spag Bol with zoodles but that’s not often. I don’t weigh absolutely everything though so I try to make sure I have a 200 calorie safety margin and don’t eat my exercise calories. So MFP gives me 1670 I think and I’ll eat approximately 1500 but also add whatever exercise calories on top, so I usually end up with 300 calories or so left available at the end of the day. Seems to work ok when I stick to it!