Is there anything you eat that you don't bother to weigh and log?

Tedebearduff

LynnJ9 wrote: »

I am curious if most people weigh and log everything. Do you weigh lettuce for salads? Do you log every little thing, even a handful of blueberries?

Vegetables, if I use some oil cooking them I will track that but not like 2 cups of broccoli

nanastaci2020

I try to log everything - and weigh most things. Partially because I'm a little OCD and in a way, that helps. If I skip things in the log, it is so easy to just stop logging totally. I do estimate low cal items from time to time. Or items that I know the details for. Example, the bread I use tends to be 45-49g for 2 slices instead of the 41g for 2 slices that it shows on the label. So I may log it as 49 without checking.

SeanD2407

Fruit with a pit I don't weigh. Peaches, Fuji apples ect. I just do the standard medium size and move on. I intentionally leave 50-100 calories under to leave room for logging errors.

Protein bars I don't weigh either. I just scan the individual packages. If the package says 90 calories, I might weigh it and its 85 or 95. That's nitpicky.

yirara

Nope I log everything. If I slack at one minor thing I know I will at things with lots more calories.

Kodekai1988

I used to think I weighed and logged “everything”... nope! I don’t weigh:

- spinach
- Green salad leaves
- Black coffee
- Coke Zero (but I do log no sugar drinks that have more than 2 calories p/100ml)
- Spices and herbs

I do weigh all veg, condiments, mills etc - I eat Keto so the carb content in veg concerns me and my condiments tend to be calorific.

its_me549

I have become almost OCD with what I log. For some reason if I don't log something to a tee, in my head I calculate a much higher number and feel guilty, like I can't eat something else later. One thing I don't calculate are things like basil, onion powder, garlic powder, and pepper. I just don't add enough to even justify counting those. But because one of the things I keep track of is fiber, I do weight out things like lettuce. Although, I always use spinach and never lettuce. I have two scales at work and two scales at home. I feel like it helps me be accountable and also helps me understand that grabbing a handful of grapes wasn't as bad as I thought in my head.

jtechmart

I weigh most items, but I did this a while ago and since I am eating the same foods, I don't weigh them again. So, if I have apples that have different weights, I don't pay much attention to that. I just log it as an apple that is already in my list of items. It may be 100 cals, 80, etc... But, I don't need to weigh the same thing every day. Most apples will be around the same, so I log them the same. The calorie count probably isn't perfect anyway, so its all a rough estimate. I may be off by 100 cals give or take, but it all works out in the end. If I'm cutting I have a large enough deficit that it's all progress anyway.

I also don't log 0 calorie items like braggs liquid aminos.

springlering62

I don’t weigh the banana I have in my smoothie every morning. I figure the law of averages will balance that out.

During cherry season, I don’t count cherries. I keep a big bag in the fridge and grab four or five a couple of times a day. That’s my guilty treat, and I only eat two or three bags a year so I roll with it. If I sit down to eat a whole bowl, those do get weighed and logged.

I find myself creeping up on the amount of skim milk I foam and heat for my chai lattes, but I’ve let that slide. The pleasure is, well, straight up pleasure, and for the amount of calories, natch. I’ll pretend with that one. It just seems ridiculously OCD to weigh out 30gr of skim milk, and a lot of it stays in the plunger anyway.

This whole thing is a mind game and obsessive rationalization. I guess that’s why I enjoy it so much. Maybe that’s why I’m so much happier these days. A safe numerical place to focus my triflin’ pettiness.

Clive_1963

I don't weigh or log any food I eat. (well 100g meat max per day) This diet I do allows me 1 bag of what ever there is or a snack bar with unlimited veg/salad from the list they gave me per meal (5 meals per day)

Already down from 94.8kg (208.9lbs) to 88.9kg (195.9lbs) in 2 weeks. 3.1kg (6.83lbs) of that is fat.
I am 1.83m tall and 57 so goal is get down to 85kg (187.3lbs)

cwolfman13

LynnJ9 wrote: »

I am curious if most people weigh and log everything. Do you weigh lettuce for salads? Do you log every little thing, even a handful of blueberries?

I don't log anything anymore, but when I did I just had a generic recipe I created for "garden salad"...didn't weigh anything out, but I would just use that to log an approximate if I had a salad and then just added other things to my log that I put on it like the dressing or chicken or eggs or whatever.

I always logged fruit, but I never weighed it...I just used the generic "medium apple" or in the case of a handful of berries I'd just log a half cup or something.

That said, with my training and whatnot I lost on average a pound per week eating around 2500 calories...so I had a good bit of wiggle room to not have to worry that much about small amounts of low calorie foods. That could be more of an issue for someone with a low calorie target. A handful of this and a handful of that can add up if you're doing that a lot, which is one of the prime reasons I think there are so many "I'm on 1200 calories and not losing weight" threads. Those things add up if you're doing quite a bit of nibbling throughout the day.

lgfrie

Maxematics wrote: »

I used to weigh EVERYTHING down to the gram. "My string cheese says 28g but mine weighs 31g? Well, let's put in 1.107 servings...hmm no...round that to 1.11 servings." However, if I had one that weighed less than a serving size? "No, I'll just keep it at 28g!"

I took a huge step back from logging because I realized that, for me, I was bordering on disordered territory.

I soooo identify with this. The first 4-5 months of my diet, I was definitely OCD with the weighing. Like, I'd buy a pack of sausage and it'd be 140 calories for 56 grams, with one sausage being one serving. I would weigh it, and inevitably it'd be 58 or 60 grams, so I'd log 1.04 or 1.07 servings. [I've discovered that most food companies use the package nutritional info as the baseline they won't undershoot (to avoid lawsuits, presumably), so you often get a little more than what's on the label. Rarely is it perfectly spot on].

Then one day I was tired of doing that and I just started logging the one serving as stated on the package and not weighing it.

Then I realized the power of taking it on faith that the calories per serving is all you have to focus on, so I'd start picking out things in the grocery store that were obviously bigger than they should be, because the rule in our house now is, whatever it says on the package is what gets recorded LOL So if I find an extra large bagel, it gets the same 280 cals as a normal bagel.

This did slow down my weight loss a bit for the obvious reason, but was well worth it from a metal relaxation and diet sustainability point of view. We never fudge as far as not recording things (except things like lettuce and mustard and such) but we're very happy to have a few extra little calories of food sneak in under the label if it happens. It's kind of like we do our part by recording what's on the label and beyond that, it's "hear no evil, see no evil" Of course this applies only to things that are already divided into discrete servings in the package, not things like butter or sour cream, which we always weigh.

MeganD1704

Hum I log everything minus 0 calorie spices.
I however do not weigh everything- my eggs, bananas, lettuce are never weighed. I do weigh my coffee creamer (half and half) as that was a lot of calories before haha.

janejellyroll

I don't log vitamins, I don't log tea, I don't log diet soda (unless it has more than 10 calories per serving). Now that I'm maintaining, I also don't log one bite of anything. Everything else gets logged.

swirlybee

I don't weigh most vegetables, especially the low calorie ones like lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, carrots, etc. I still log them but use volumetric figures instead. I did weigh them ages ago just to make sure I'm close to my guestimate volume and they were only a difference of maybe 4-5 calories. Fruits, I'll put in something like 1 large banana. I've weighed it before so I know the entry is close enough for me. At the end of the day, I maybe off by about 50 calories in either direction but that's not enough to make a drastic difference in the big picture of weight loss/maintenance.

Strudders67

I log everything apart from herbs and spices (unless they're part of a recipe I have in MFP) and water.

I weigh most things but not drinks, coffee, milk in tea, cereal bars, slices of bread (I don't even eat one slice a month so it's no big deal), bananas (also not something I eat often), babybel cheese, rice cakes or single-portion packs of crisps. They just get logged as the packaged item / 'a slice' / medium banana etc. I measured milk for my tea a couple of times, early on, realised it was consistently 20ml of milk and just stuck with that entry ever since. If I'm away from my home for a meal, I use my judgement on the best database entry to select.

None of this was/is happening daily and, as I was losing weight, any calorie difference may have affected my goal by a few hours or days but not enough to worry about. I've pretty much averaged at my target cals every week and I figured that a few cals here and there would net out over a period of time anyway.

Jacq_qui

Oat milk. I have a bit in the top of my small home-made coffee's. It's low calorie, I only have 2-3 coffees a day, so probably comes in at 100ml which is around 50cals. I'm always under calorie goal by the end of the day anyway.

Also water. I have big jug by the sink so I track it that way.

I have started weighing my apples and bananas though, as I think that was a way of tightening up stuff.

scarlett_k

When I'm building a recipe I won't weigh individual non-calorie-dense vegetables as I know approximately how much a small/medium/large carrot, onion or whatever weighs and that's good enough for recipes feeding 4-6 people. I also don't measure how much milk I have in tea. Approximation works for me and if it ever stops then I'll start measuring things more precisely.

mkculs13

Occasionally I won't log lettuce, or I log it with a wild estimate of the amount b/c I didn't weigh it. For other things, I tend log 1 serving even when my serving is slightly less (26 grams vs. 28 grams for the USDA calculated serving size, for example). It's like I log my exercise--the minimum I can claim even if I know I probably did a little more. I'm not too worried about these tiny amounts making much difference right now. If I get stuck and stop losing, I'll be more religiously accurate, I guess, but it will probably be a while before I see a slow down of any sort. I almost never fail to log accurately when items exceed the standard serving, though.

threewins

Free food. I stay at a place regularly and they'd leave little biscuits which I would enjoy and not log because it's too small. Sadly they haven't left them in over a year so I'll assume they aren't coming back. Also those tiny little milk containers for drinks, maybe 35ml.

Slacker16

I don't log soup cubes, diet drinks, etc... even if they do have minute amounts of calories. With things in the 5-10 calorie range, I figure they'd make me sick before making a significant contribution.