New member. Advice on logging in my meals.

adeconciliis

Hello everyone! I’m new to MyFitnessPal and I’m reaching out for suggestions on the best way to log my food.
We cook home mostly and I’m really not sure how precise I need to be with my meal description .
Do I need to measure and weigh everything? I want to make sure I get this right for obvious reasons. Any help is appreciated. Thank you 🙏🏼

janejellyroll

You don't NEED to weight or measure anything to lose weight. You'd lose weight without even know what a calorie was if you managed to reach a calorie deficit. However, many of us find it easier to know when we're hitting a specific calorie goal when we accurately measure our foods. For many of us, that means weighing food. Others have had success with less accurate methods like measuring cups and some people can even do it with the least accurate methods like eyeballing portions.

I personally weigh food because I found that measuring cups were not helping me consistently hit my calorie goal (which I realized when I was going through a cycle of gaining and losing the same five pounds). Once I began weighing food, my weight loss began progressing exactly as I expected.

lemurcat2

I mostly cook at home and weigh everything (but liquids, for which I use cups). It's easy enough to do as part of the cooking process. For many of us (including me, before I decided weighing was easier and more fun anyway), you can get away with being less precise and just using cups/tablespoons or more estimated measures, and of course that's much more the case for low cal items like vegetables than higher cal ones.

A bigger issue would be something like cooking a beef stew and then finding something in the database that says "beef stew, homemade, one serving." That is so inaccurate, likely, for your dish, your ingredients, your serving size, that it is worthless.