Tips and tricks for logging home cooked meals.

christa_meck

Hi everyone! I've been here on and off for several years, but I've recently identified a stumbling block: Logging home cooked meals - especially dinner.

Dinner is the meal I eat with my partner and it's usually the most elaborate. By most elaborate, I mean: It includes the most ingredients. Even though we eat a whole foods type of diet, I find myself struggling almost every dinner to get through logging all the things.

What tips and tricks help you get through it?

emchatt2018

I have the same problem. It’s so time consuming. I suppose if it’s a meal you make regularly you could save it to use again so you don’t have to put it all in every time

yirara

All my dinners are home-cooked, and logging doesn't take a lot longer than a few seconds. Especially if you've found a good database entry before and used it it will always come up again first. That makes things a lot easier.

I mean, just throw what you want to put into the pot on the scale, weight, log while something else is cooking. If you want to figure out how much everyone eats.. potatoes is easy. you know how many grams total potatoes you have. Then put your plate on the scale, tar, serve potatoes, note weight. For a pot with mixed things you can weight the empty pot, then weigh again after cooking and you know how much weight the food has. Then again serve and find out how much you eat of that.

As I live alone it's easier. I generally cook for at least 2 days, and then divide the total by two. Yeah, one day it might be a bit more food and the other a bit less, but it evens out after those two days.

Lietchi

Sharing with other people does require a bit more work than if you're eating everything yourself.

My process:
- I weigh and log all of the raw ingredients for a dish (anything that goes in one pan or pot) in a future meal in my diary (temporary placeholder).
- I weigh the cooked dish and subtract the weight of the pot/pan
- I save the meal, putting the weight of it into the title as well as the name/ingredients of the dish
- I weigh my individual portion - I divide that weight by the total weight (for example 355gr/1525gr) and then log that fraction of the meal in my diary (0.233 in this example)

Things that help make the process easier:
- If a dish is similar to one I've had before, I will use that meal as a starting point to tweak quantities and ingredients.
- Keep a list of your pots and pans with the weight of each
- for larger pieces of meat or fish cooked without anything else, I simply choose and weigh 'my' piece(s) beforehand (and keep them separate in the pan) instead of weighing everything before and after cooking
- for cooked potatoes or rice (on the side, not cooked with anything else), I only weigh my own cooked portion and use a cooked rice/boiled potatoes entry (after comparing this with the more complicated method of weighing raw, weighing cooked and weighing my portion, it seems equally accurate)
- I often cook enough food for two dinners

kevymetal_

I mainly use whole food ingredients as well, with the exception of a few things. I weigh everything raw, and to speed up the process, instead of logging it, I weigh and then snap a picture of the ingredient in the bowl, on the scale with the weight displayed. Then, after dinner, when I'm watching a tv show or hanging out on the couch, I can just look at the photos and do my logging from there and not be in a rush, or risk forgetting to add something.

It's just my wife and I so, for the most part, I just weigh everything cooked at the end, and then portion accordingly. I try not to overthink it. While I try to be as accurate as possible, I also know calorie counting isn't an exact science, and there will be discrepancies, so I don't stress out too much about it.