Weigh before or after cooking?

khall86790

I read somewhere online you should weigh pasta before you cook it in order to work out your calorie intake as with water it adds weight to the pasta but does not equal the amount of calories for that weight the packet tells you.
I ate couscous tonight and weighed it before I cooked it, entered it into my calories for the day but then after I had eaten it I thought well I obviously have eaten over the grams I logged because it was a much larger portion after cooking. But as the only thing I have added is water, am I right to weigh and log it pre-cooking? Or should I have weighed it after?

jilliew

I think it doesn't really matter, as long as you're aware that you're tracking the proper thing. For instance, don't weigh your raw chicken then log it as cooked chicken.

I usually weigh everything after it's cooked, mostly because I cook for more than one person and I find it really hard to keep my weighed portion seperate from someone else's not-weighed portion (did that sentance even make sense?). I cook two or three chicken breasts at a time, for example, so I just weigh my portion before I eat it and let everyone else do their thing.

Serena_Kitty

If you enter it in your log as "couscous, dry, uncooked" or something similar, the calories are still accurate regardless of weight change.

The volume of the food changes, but the nutrition doesn't. Same with pasta. Just make sure you're logging it correctly - don't use "couscous, cooked" to measure uncooked couscous, for example.

khall86790

Thanks guys, looks like I got it right that I have it under uncooked and weighed it uncooked. Was just a little sure if cooking it did change the calories. I know it sounds ridiculous but when I googled it I got a lot of conflicting information about uncooked foods having less nutrients than cooked, etc. It all just got so confusing!