Why estimating cals in is risky

nanastaci2020

Made home made mac n cheese with hubby today. Had literally a couple of bites to try it. My "portion" weighed 55 grams cooked. Not a lot of food. If I had to estimate, I would have said 50 cals.

I programmed the elbow pasta, whole milk, butter, flour and cheddar cheese into the recipe calculator. Entire dish was 2460 grams.

My 55 grams? 139 cslories! Note that there were no attempts made to make this dish "lighter". Hubs used more than 50% extra cheddar compared to what the original recipe required. 70 cals per bite pretty much. Yikes!

wilson10102018

Estimates are better than nothing. With a scale, no one has to miss by much. Red meat has about 3 calories per gram, fish 1 to 2 calories per gram, Pasta 4 calories per gram raw, about 2 calories per gram cooked. Oil 9 calories per gram. Cheese 4 calories per gram.

jwoolman5

2oz (56g) dry of any type of pasta (wheat or non-wheat) is likely to be 180 to 200 calories, so that 55 grams of mac&cheese was never going to be 50 calories....

RunsWithBees

Pasta and cheese will usually be very calorie heavy! I usually reserve pasta for days when I go for a long run to balance it out. It took me awhile to learn about calories when I started losing weight but now I can guesstimate pretty closely and this knowledge has helped me maintain my goal weight for 6+ years without constant logging. I only go back to logging if my weight goes above my buffer zone of 5 lbs. You should eventually get better at roughly estimating just keep weighing and logging... live and learn!

nanastaci2020

Just saying that if I had not weighed it, not calculated the recipe: I would have assumed much less. And I know better! So those not skilled w food scsle and recipe calculator: have no clue how quickly calories add up.