I admit it... I eye-ball most of my food. But, I log everything that goes in my mouth. The only time I do quick calories is if I give myself a break and go to the buffet. No way to track all that.

I've been kind of unfocused as of late though, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn I'm eating more than I think I am.

You can track a buffet, maybe not 100% but I have gotten pretty good at it, drives hubby crazy though as it takes me about a half hour. I also managed to reduce from approx. 1800 per trip to approx. 1000 per trip by sticking to fish (baked not fried) salads (not the seafood one) veggies, only a spoonful of anything cheesy or saucy. I usually end up with 2 plates and just one thing of the desert stand.

So you're supposed to weight pasta AFTER you've cooked it? Does the same go for brown rice?

I would weigh both before and make sure you use the dry weight calorie values.

So you're supposed to weight pasta AFTER you've cooked it? Does the same go for brown rice?

No.

If you found an entry for a cooked anything that water is added to, or water could be cooked out of - it was user entered - by someone that doesn't understand the concept of very different water weights being possible after cooking by whoever is making a dish the way they want it.

WOW!! Thank you for the video. I will now be more diligent in weighing my food. I knew to level out my scoops (and used a knife) but I never knew they didn't really mean a 1/2 cup of oatmeal.

I always underestimate my calories, knowing there's creep in there (the nibble from my husband's plate, the taste while cooking). Never knew what it meant in terms of calories. Never licking the peanut butter spoon again!!

Thanks for the great advice (from all posters)

If you zero out the spoon on the scale, then weigh the PB, then yes you do lick every last delicious taste off.

The biggest culprit for me was Pasta. I bought a digital scale from Walmart for $19.99...and I actually weighed out a serving and got about 8 or 9 pieces of Penne LOL.

Weighing pasta was a harrowing, tragic experience for me.

That and fried rice.

Sad days those were.

This is me. :bigsmile: :sad:

I see lots of people doing this stuff, clearly not logging everything, but I try to be very careful, I add condiments that have any calories (the only things I don't add are hot sauce and plain mustard which both have zero calories and just sodium, but I keep in mind that there is sodium in them), I don't really use any other condiments, and I have weighed stuff enough and measured stuff enough to have a good idea of sizes of things when eating out or not having access to scales or other measuring tools (like at school). So, I just upped my calories from 1500 (which according to many things is slighly under my BMR) to 2000 calories which is about TDEE-10%, but usually don't get to 2000. I leave room in my diary for little bites of things and when it turns into more than that I add it as a whole food and if it puts me over i'll readjust the rest of the day. So I consider myself very careful and I seem to have hit a plateau so I've upped my calories and going to see how that goes.

Also, when I'm adding a food i haven't added before I take a while and I look through a bunch of entries, specific recipes similar to what i'm eating and also generic and see what a kind of average calories etc. is and then choose one. If it's something kind of complicated I will add everything individually like X oz chicken, X oil, X veggies, etc.
Whenever i'm making a recipe I add it to my recipe box with the exact brands I used to make sure it's accurate. The thing I find hard is when I eat meats out, like if it's labeled roasted and seared (like the pork chop I'll have out for dinner tomorrow), how do I guess how much oil is on it, I think I'll start dabbing it off.

I see lots of people doing this stuff, clearly not logging everything, but I try to be very careful, I add condiments that have any calories (the only things I don't add are hot sauce and plain mustard which both have zero calories and just sodium, but I keep in mind that there is sodium in them), I don't really use any other condiments, and I have weighed stuff enough and measured stuff enough to have a good idea of sizes of things when eating out or not having access to scales or other measuring tools (like at school). So, I just upped my calories from 1500 (which according to many things is slighly under my BMR) to 2000 calories which is about TDEE-10%, but usually don't get to 2000. I leave room in my diary for little bites of things and when it turns into more than that I add it as a whole food and if it puts me over i'll readjust the rest of the day. So I consider myself very careful and I seem to have hit a plateau so I've upped my calories and going to see how that goes.

Also, when I'm adding a food i haven't added before I take a while and I look through a bunch of entries, specific recipes similar to what i'm eating and also generic and see what a kind of average calories etc. is and then choose one. If it's something kind of complicated I will add everything individually like X oz chicken, X oil, X veggies, etc.
Whenever i'm making a recipe I add it to my recipe box with the exact brands I used to make sure it's accurate. The thing I find hard is when I eat meats out, like if it's labeled roasted and seared (like the pork chop I'll have out for dinner tomorrow), how do I guess how much oil is on it, I think I'll start dabbing it off.

If you have hit a plateau, upping calories is generally not the direction to go. TDEE - 10% leaves very little room for error - on both sides...the estimate of TDEE and the estimate of caloric intake.

The biggest culprit for me was Pasta. I bought a digital scale from Walmart for $19.99...and I actually weighed out a serving and got about 8 or 9 pieces of Penne LOL.

Weighing pasta was a harrowing, tragic experience for me.

That and fried rice.

Sad days those were.

This is me. :bigsmile: :sad:

You all shouldn't be weighing out cooked pasta, that's not what the nutrition info is based on, which includes water weight if cooked.
They have no idea how much water yours will retain.
Nutrition label is dry pasta.

You are so incorrectly limiting yourself in serving size in that case.

Who said it was cooked pasta?
And there are entries for cooked and for raw pasta in the database.
But thanks for the sympathy.

The first person did, and others agreed with them, perhaps not realizing that mistaken way of doing it.

And anyone that manually put in a cooked pasta entry doesn't realize the foolishness of such an idea, and the confusion it has caused, besides this thread are others where many were surprised you don't weigh many foods after cooking.

That would be as bad as looking up an apple, seeing what the nutritional info is for 100 grams, and then proceeding to eat 100 grams of dehydrated apple chips. Big surprise - other direction.

I can't speak for everyone, but I agreed that weighing pasta was a harrowing experience. Cooked or uncooked, a lot of us would like the portion to be bigger.
You just have to be aware of what you're weighing; it doesn't matter when you do it, as long as you correctly choose cooked or uncooked.

Well, that's the point I hope everyone gets.

Don't weigh cooked pasta, even if there is an entry for it - it can be so wrong as to be useless.

It totally matters when you weigh it.

Did your cooking it absorb as much water weight as the person that entered the info for their cooking job in to the database?
Did you weigh it at different time as more water steamed off the pasta perhaps?

Ever weigh the same dry weight pasta after cooking to see how it can fluctuate 2-6 oz per serving because of that difference?

If the idea of weighing is to get more control on accuracy while still keeping it somewhat simple, weighing at the wrong time just throws that out the window.

That's why any items you control the amount of water cooked in to or out of a food should always be done prior to cooking.

I can't imagine a poor Italian on a diet, discovering how little of his mamma's pasta he gets to eat now, let alone the rest of us that love it.

I always logged the raw ingredients of anything I made thinking I was being lazy, but now I see I've been doing it correctly all along. I like it when this happens. :drinker:

This is a GREAT thread. I cook almost all of my own food and so have been logging each ingredient -- that works for me. I also have a food scale & have worked in the restaurant industry since I was 16 so weighing and taring and weighing and taring and being very exact is second nature.

However, the tip about taring out the jar of peanut butter and counting the negative calories --- fantastic!

That video is scary though. My mom lost about 40 pounds a few years ago and has been at a (relatively healthy but frustrating) plateau since then. I sent her that video. I await her forlorn phone call soon, asking for recommendations on kitchen scales.... ; )

I got an Ozeri digital scale from Amazon for about $25. It has a smooth open glass surface for easy cleaning and can weigh up to 18 pounds. So I can weigh other stuff besides food like packages.

Thanks to the folks who shared weighing tips and tricks. I picked up some good ones: weigh the container before & after taking food out (spoon licking FTW), zeroing out the scale after each new ingredient added, using 3 oz or 4 oz or 100 grams as a standard serving size.

Here's a suggestion for people worried if their is scale accurate. You can buy a weight calibration set or individual weights for less than $5 dollars. If you don't know where to buy locally, both eBay and Amazon have them.

I've gotten lazy with measuring - I have my food scale out every day but typically it's for pasta or cereal or something dry. I've never once measured my protein powder, trusting the scoop. I've never once measured a banana. Would be a good idea to be more diligent for a week anyway and see how close I've been in my estimates.

I can understand the logic if trying to be more accurate but how critical is it when the exercise calories are only a rough estimate at best?

Well, that's the idea, trying to be even more accurate on one side of the equation because the other side has some bad potential for being inaccurate.

Of course, if you can log well, and come in from the high side, it really doesn't matter what the burn calories are or the most accurate eaten calories are.

If you logged you ate 2000 and that should have caused 1 lb loss in 2 weeks, even if it was really 2200 or 2400, and you lost no weight, you remove 250 calories from your diet, accurate calories.

Now the numbers may say 1750, but because of sloppy logging, it could be 1950 or 2150 really.

But you've just created a real deficit now.

Sorry if this has already been asked (this is a pretty long thread so haven't read all the posts) - when weighing food such as meat, specifically chicken/turkey breast in my case, is it more accurate to weigh it raw or cooked? I usually grill chicken/turkey breast and add no oil.