Hidden calories and visual missidentification of portion siz

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campuschef
campuschef Posts: 10 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hi everybody,

I have to say that this week began with my wife and I deciding to keep steady to a 1800 calorie per day diet. We thought, sure...this will be easy. We simply have to eat less of the foods that we had been. How mistaken we were.

Using a digital scale, I have been weighing everything or measuring everything that we eat. I have been using the myfitnesspal app on my iPhone to track our progress. What we found, is that foods that we thought were less in calories were in general, but the hidden ingredients just keep adding up and adding up until there is no more benefit left, or that the portion size is much less than our eyes imagined it.

As a corporate executive chef, I have been preparing meals for others over 30 years, but never took my own diet seriously. Now that I am, I am absolutely amazed of what I had been ignoring for decades.

If anyone has any similar experience with reading lables, weighing their meals, or following recipes to the "T", let me know.

I look forward to everyone's thoughts.

Replies

  • becoming_a_new_me
    becoming_a_new_me Posts: 1,860 Member
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    I am a foodie and ametaur chef. When I started to weigh foods and follow recipes (I used to be a pinch of this handful of that persn), I was like "I got this...my recipes always turn out great and people love my cooking". Boy was I wrong! My scale, measuring cups, and measuring spoons are now my best friends. Prior to my journey, I would spend extra on quality pans, dishes, silverware, etc....anything but good quality measuring devices. Now I make sure my meausuring devices are top of the line before I spend extra on cooking utensils
  • runbyme
    runbyme Posts: 522 Member
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    I have weighed and measured my meals for quite a while so I kind of knew (I thought) where all my calories were coming from. I was not, however, counting "little" things like creamer in my coffee. It's just 10-15 calories, right? Yeah...until you've had 5 or 6 cups of coffee and pretty soon I've had 100 calories I hadn't even kept track of! Grrrr!
    Good luck to you and yours with your weight loss journey!
  • jvan1957
    jvan1957 Posts: 114
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    Hi Chef

    I have found that it is very hard for me to get to my calorie count (1979) without totally messing up my macros because of the ingredients added to food. I have tried eating clean and cannot eat enough to get anywhere near a decent calorie count. It has taken a lot of adjusting and now what I do is eat a couple of meals and then looking at carbs and sodium etc. I adjust my last meal to fit them and sometimes can only have fruit or nuts for my last meal. Also, as you said, having had been a chef for a number of years I was very surprised at you said the hidden calories and missidentification of portion size.

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