Dumb question about tracking weighed food

sarah456s
sarah456s Posts: 98 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I have a dumb question, but please bear with me!

A lot of people talk about using a food scale, but every time I try, I get frustrated at tracking the food and go back to using volume measurements and guesses. I must be doing something wrong - how do you actually track the food you weighed?

For example, a few weeks ago I baked some sweet potato. I weighed it out before cooking, and it came to 251 grams. So I went to track it, and it seemed every sweet potato entry had serving sizes of "1 medium potato" or some such. I went through I think 10 entries, clicking on the serving size to see if there was one in either oz or grams before I came to one that had the data for 100g. So I entered that I had 2.5 servings. Close enough to 251, but actually 1 gram short.

It seems like there's always a lot of finding the right entry, OR math involved in figuring out how many servings I had, or in converting between grams and ounces.

Please tell me there's an easy way that I'm just missing?

Replies

  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    try "sweet potato usda" most of these entries are by weight
  • MandyMason7
    MandyMason7 Posts: 185 Member
    I always try to put "USDA" after whatever I am searching for so that the list comes up with grams as an option and usually the option of 1 gram is there as well so I can input the exact amount of grams my food weighed.
  • JTick
    JTick Posts: 2,131 Member
    If your scale doesn't have an ounce AND a gram unit, I'd suggest buying a new scale. Converting between the two would be a pain in the butt. I can pick ounces or grams by just pushing a button.

    Secondly, the first time you eat a new food it can be a little bit of a pain to find the right entry. However, once you do, it mostly remains in your history. When entering veggies or fruit, try adding an "s" on the end....grapes instead of grape, apples instead of apple. This will usually bring up the entry with the "100.0 g" measurement. When looking for meats, I always put "raw" on the end...yesterday I was trying to find ground beef and kept getting recipes that contained ground beef. I added "raw" to the end and had my entry in just a couple seconds.
  • kimd2090
    kimd2090 Posts: 28 Member
    Great Info, bump for later!
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    Nope, you got it right, not all entries include weight.

    The good ones have it included in the name (sweet potato 100g) so you can scan quickly and find those.

    Good job weighing before you cooked it too.

    Raw weights are better than cooked weights, and finding an entry for a cooked weight is really hard. Besides which, did they leave as much water in their cooked as you did?

    You are correct, finding the entries the first time can be difficult, but once you hit all your common foods, you got it.
  • spoiledpuppies
    spoiledpuppies Posts: 675 Member
    Nope, you got it right, not all entries include weight.

    The good ones have it included in the name (sweet potato 100g) so you can scan quickly and find those.

    Good job weighing before you cooked it too.

    Raw weights are better than cooked weights, and finding an entry for a cooked weight is really hard. Besides which, did they leave as much water in their cooked as you did?

    You are correct, finding the entries the first time can be difficult, but once you hit all your common foods, you got it.

    You can also go to multiple decimal spots...so you could have recorded it as 2.51 servings.
  • Ready2Rock206
    Ready2Rock206 Posts: 9,487 Member
    enter the food in plural form (bananas vs banana, strawberries vs strawberry) - and then either usda, fresh or raw - those are the quickest ways to get to oz/grams

    And as someone else mentioned 2.51 would get that extra gram in there...
  • sarah456s
    sarah456s Posts: 98 Member
    Thanks guys!

    My scale does easily switch between oz and grams - I don't mind which I use, but it seemed like I was having the same math issue with either.

    And as far as the 2.51 servings....yup, forgot to mention that I only recently found how to switch to a decimal when entering the serving size. Previously I had it set on the default of fractions, so it was only offering me 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc. Now I've got it switched to the decimals so I could do 2.51.

    I will look for the USDA, raw or plural entries from now on.

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