How do you log your meals when you’re a no recipe kinda mom?

HMUA123
HMUA123 Posts: 2 Member
Hi folks, I’m new sort of to this app and I find tracking my meals I’ve cooked on a whim, really hard to log. Do you log each ingredient in the dish as a whole or do you log just what’s in your plate? For example- I made salmon filets with basmati rice and steamed veggies. I made a soya sauce based sauce with home made spicy mayo drizzled on top. Howwwwwww do I log all that? TYSM!

Answers

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,401 Member
    edited September 26
    Well, I found that by logging everything I use I am able to reliably control my weight.

    So...my suggestion would be to try to do that as much as you can until you get a mental picture of ACTUAL serving sizes. If you're over weight, you haven't learned that by the seat of your pants, so doesn't it make sense to figure that out?

    Write it on a scrap of paper as you add it to the dish, obviously it would be best to be using a digital food scale, but do your best with measuring devices if that's all you've got.

    One serving of rice is easy for me to eye-ball now that I've been doing that for a while. Same with four ounces of any given protein, like the salmon. Negligible calories in soy. The vegetables can just be logged as a cup of mixed vegetables if you aren't using butter or cheese or other toppings.

    I'd suggest really getting strict about the use of toppings like a mayo-based thing. You could be using 3g or 30g and unless you know for sure that could be a problem.

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,780 Member
    Depending on what the food is, I'll either:
    - weigh the individual raw ingredients of the dish (notepad), log/save all of that as a meal (with the total weight of the cooked dish in the title) and then weigh my own portion and log the appropriate fraction of the meal in my diary
    - weigh my part beforehand: for simple/ larger items like pieces of meat/ filets of fish/... where I've determined my portion of the meat/ fish beforehand
    - weigh the cooked food and log it using a cooked food entry (for example cooked rice, boiled potatoes,... - the cooked weight doesn't vary a lot according to cooking method/ duration)
  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,780 Member
    PS: for things like sauces added to dishes, the tare function of the scale is really handy. Put sauce container on scale, tare to zero, take as much sauce as you want and then put the container back on the scale. The negative number is then logged.
    Same method is handy for adding sauce/ oils/... when cooking.
  • SafariGalNYC
    SafariGalNYC Posts: 1,420 Member
    I log the ingredients. I only log what I eat in my plate. Measure your portion.
  • pony4us
    pony4us Posts: 161 Member
    I am also a dump and pour always from scratch cook. I lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for about two years at age 75. In the beginning I weighed common portions to get an idea of how much a 4oz portion or 1 tsp portion really looked like, but I have never been a must weigh every single item cook...and I gave my background to let you see that everyone has their own route to success. I was surprised to find that for things like butter, oil, mayo etc my personal portion was smaller than most suggested in the data base (I use real butter but don't put a tsp on bread). It is trial and error for what works for you and your busy lifestyle, adjust your portion size, see if that helps to get you to lose at a rate that makes you happy then adjust again. If you find weighing everything somethig that works for you go for it but for me I look a a general recipe for a pan sauce I make, look in the data base for calories that are close to the recipe and "close enough" works well. I'm not stressing for a splash of wine or how big my lemon is for juice.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,089 Member
    For that particular meal, find cooked entries for the salmon, rice, and veggies (even if it's mixed veggies, you could treat things like brocolli, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, summer squash, leafy greens as a single veg so long as your concern is mainly calories -- if the mix includes more caloric things like peas, beans, carrots, winter squash, potatoes, maybe figure 3/4 of the weight is coming from those -- they're denser by weight as well as calories).

    For the sauce, I wouldn't worry about logging the soya sauce (assuming it's what we call soy sauce in the U.S. -- if it's a thicker soy-based sauce you should log it), unless you're worried about sodium). Weigh the mayo-based sauce as you add it to your plate and log it as mayo.