Tips please for logging food when cooking from scratch

Lithana

Hello there,

I find it so cumbersome to track every single ingredient because I like to cook from scratch (which is healthier). So much easier to scan a bar code than weight each zucchini, eggplant, lamb, bread and Mayo like I did last time when I made a sandwich or when I made a ceasar salad with a twist. So I often don't track because of that.
Any tips from you experienced and disciplined folks? 😊 🙏

pamperedlinny

If I know that I make something often or will have something extremely similar in the future (I'll change something out out do a twist on a dish occasionally) I'll create the recipe or create a meal just once and use that even if it's a bit different the next time.

Also, if it's pretty close to a classic I'll use whatever is already entered. I made homemade chex mix but use the calories for the store bought because it won't be hugely different.

It depends on how exact you want to be with your logging though.

sbelletti

You won't like my answer but... I weigh and log every ingredient, create the recipe in MFP, then portion it out and weigh each serving when it's consumed. If you want accuracy, that's the best way to do it.

For some folks, it may not matter if they aren't 100% exact. At my age and weight, all it takes is a little error to push me out of maintenance. Especially if you cook in batches and eat the same meal for several days in a row... Unaccounted-for calories can really add up in a week!

AnnPT77

First, I'd ask how you're using the scale. There are shortcuts. Here are a few examples:

• Assembling a salad in a bowl, a stew in a pan, sandwich on a plate? Put the bowl/pan/plate on the scale, zero, add an ingredient, note the weight, zero, add the next ingredient, note the weight . . . .
• Using something from a carton or jar, or cutting a slice from a hunk of cheese? Put the container or chunk on the scale, zero, take out portion, note the negative value (it's the amount you took out).
• Eating a whole apple, banana, un-hulled strawberries, corn on the cob? Weigh the ready-to-eat food, eat the yummy parts, weigh the core/hulls/peel, subtract & note.
• I like to keep a few clean plastic yogurt-tub lids around to weigh small items, like a handful of nuts or chopped hardboiled eggs or something. Drop the lid on the scale, zero, add item, note weight, eat or use - just a quick rinse of the lid under the faucet & you're done.

Personally, I find it easier to note these things on paper while I'm cooking, log the whole meal in MFP later. Sometimes I log in MFP only once a day, just using that scribbled list. (I like to use random junk mail envelopes or other paper scraps I'll be recycling for notes, but YMMV.)

Second, if you have things that you make sort of the same way frequently, such as a sandwich or Ceaser-like salad, save those things as an MFP "meal". When you pick a meal to log, it brings the individual items into your diary (not just a one-liner like when you use an MFP recipe). It's easy to adjust the quantity or delete/add items right in your diary then. Some people only worry about the higher-calorie items. Personally, I find it easier to autopilot log everything - for me, that takes up less brain bandwidth, leads to fewer errors.

I'm not remotely disciplined, but after getting my recent/frequent foods populated, and some basic meals set up, plus keeping my scale handy on the counter all the time, it rarely takes me even as much as 10 minutes a day to log my eating. To me, that's a small price to pay to have gotten from class 1 obese to a healthy weight in less than a year, and having stayed at a healthy weight for 7 years since. I feel so much better, have less pain/discomfort, and other quality of life improvements as a result . . . for way less than 10 minutes a day. That's a win, in my book.

P.S. I cook at home from scratch the overwhelming majority of meals. Yesterday, my diary had 32 food items. It was a pretty typical day.

1BlueAurora

I log in as accurately as possible (so a hamburger patty is something I'd weigh and enter into MFP, then the ketchup, mustard and tomato slice) but give myself some slack on other things I cook. If I make macaroni and cheese from scratch, or a beef stew, I use the general MFP estimates already in the system. I mean, I'm with you - I'm not going to weigh the beef chunks, potatoes and carrots in the stew to get micro-managing results. I wing it a little by inputting "beef stew" and picking one of the higher calorie estimates and call it a day.

mtaratoot

I cook a LOT. I love to cook. I don't find it that much work to toss ingredients on a scale either as I prep them or as I add them to a dish. @AnnPT77 mentioned using the tare feature. That's key. When I'm doing a mise en place style dish, I can put prepped ingredients in empty yogurt containers. I can tare one empty one and then weigh each one and scribble down the mass on a scrap of paper and enter later.

Some things that are not calorie dense like salad mix, I sometimes <gasp> estimate. I know; crazy, right? For cooking oil, I tare the bottle and freehand pour and then weigh what I added. I have become very adept at estimating an 11 gram pour. There's other ways I "cheat." I made a recipe for black bean soup. I don't typically use recipes, so each batch is different. I set the recipe up so that one serving is one gram. When I make any bean soup, even if it's the Mayocoba bean soup I made yesterday, I just pretend it's black bean soup. I either weigh the bowl, add hot soup, and re-weigh, or if it's the day after, I weigh before I put it in the pan.

For big batches that I'm going to make a new recipe, I sometimes use the scale to weigh the whole pot. I used a magic marker to put the tare weight of my cookware on the outside of each pot. Then I know how many "one gram servings" there are. Or 100 gram servings. It doesn't matter.

Over time, you'll get used to it, and it will add maybe 94 seconds to the 45 minutes it takes you to prepare a delicious meal.

Rockmama1111

I cook from scratch a lot with no recipe, and I create a new recipe in MFP each time. I do have a few things in regular rotation, so I adjust quantities on the recipe I’ve built. This has been my biggest personal annoyance, because it takes a little joy out of cooking in the creative way I like to do it. I don’t know any other way around it.

I will explore the “meals” hack that was mentioned above! It sounds like that would be ideal for one-serving dishes.

penguinmama87

I will echo the advice given above!

One MFP hack I have learned: I really prefer editing recipes on my laptop instead of on mobile. But searching recipes is a lot easier on mobile. I have hundreds of recipes saved at this point. So when I want to open one, I will search for it on mobile, edit the serving size (weight of the recipe) by one, and then it shows up as the most recent recipe on my web browser.

I also have a spreadsheet with all my pan weights on it so if I forget to tare or write it down ahead of time, I can just look it up. It's not completely filled in yet but once it is I'm going to print it and put it on the inside of one of my cabinet doors. I plan to do the same with weight/cup conversions for common ingredients. I do really like saving myself dishes when cooking by weight.