Weighing vs measuring food

after reading this. i could definitely improve in this area. but i also want to argue that i dont want to be 60 walking around measuring everything. if its cereal or things in a box with serving sizes, i do grab a measuring cup. but things things like fruits and veggies im not going to go crazy. im not going to measure out cups of lettuce and tomatoes. and many items like bananas and apples have the fruit sizes listed. when i get into dinners i will create a recipe. enter all the ingredients. and if the meal creates leftovers, i will put the additional in the correct serving size in plastic bowls. and when all else fails, just estimate up? i just think its getting a little too crazy when your talking onions and such.

Maybe it's just being English and always having scales about in the kitchen for baking but when I first joined MFP I was so confused about things being '1 cup' and the like. That means nothing - I mean, 1 full tightly packed cup, 1 loosely packed one, 1 with everything chopped very finely, 1 without - so much potential for variation. I had no idea of how much '1 cup' was as nobody I know uses measuring cups for anything (baking tends to be done in grams or ounces and we measure butter and don't use 'sticks').
I've always done everything in weight not volume (excluding liquids) so I had no idea how much that was and often had to search harder to find an item in the database I could use. I still get frustrated if I have to use '1 large' or '1 small' for apples and '1 portion' annoys me too as portion sizes can vary wildly too.

The weight of the onion is to be weighed before you chop it up not after. You are inflating calories this way.
Just like you weigh meat before cooking not after.

Typically you don't weigh meat before. A serving of chicken is approximately 4 oz raw or 3 oz cooked. Most databases use cooked meat values (according to a few articles I've read). When you cook meat, you lose some of the fat.

On the weight of the onion, weighing it after you chop it is fine since there is no change in moisture content or anything else occuring during the chopping. If you are weighing it raw, weighing it chopped or whole shouldn't make a calorie difference, except if you discard part of the onion while chopping, then your weight would be off.

As for weighing meat, to be the most accurate, you should weigh it BEFORE cooking as the raw weight is much more accurate than the cooked weight. In the MFP database, if you put in chicken breast, raw or ribeye steak, raw, etc. it is easy to find these measurements that use raw instead of cooked. The reason for weighing anything (meat or veggies) raw is that when you cook something, the final weight is determined by how much moisture is lost or gained, which can vary greatly. You really aren't losing a ton of fat when you cook most items. The only time I really make an exception to the pre-cooked and after cooked weight is ground meat when I cook the meat and drain AND rinse the meat. Then, I look for an entry that describes that process. In that case, you are losing a good deal of fat through the cooking and draining and rinsing process. But, if you start with boneless skinless chicken, there's really very little fat to lose during cooking.


A great example of why raw weight is better than cooked weight is steak. You could start with an 8 oz ribeye and have it cooked medium-rare and weigh 6.5 oz cooked and then go ahead and cook it further to make it well done and the final weight could be 5 oz cooked. Track it raw and you are tracking nearly 450 calories; using one of the "cooked, grilled" entries, the medium rare 6.5 oz steak comes out to about 439 calories but the well done 5 oz cooked steak only comes up as 336 calories. That's a huge discrepency for that one piece of meat when the only thing that changed was how much moisture was lost. The same happens with pork chops and chicken and lots of foods. If you cook yours and it comes out "dry" and weighs an ounce less than mine does, but we both started with the same size chop, are you really getting less calories than me? Nope, you're just getting less moisture.

Just being off by a little bit here and there can quickly lead to frustration and "stalls".