Before or After cooking ? is there a definit answer

dratefs
dratefs Posts: 7 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hi Guys
This is my 1st. post in MFP, hope it does not disturb the guys know by heart the right answer :blushing: :blushing: :blushing:
Simply I weigh food after cooking....I've already lost 25 Kg (55 pounds I guess) since I started..but greedy to lose more weekly than I accomplish
That is why I ask the frequently asked (and and also answered) Question.. is there a definite answer?
Thank you all for time :heart:

Replies

  • SezxyStef
    SezxyStef Posts: 15,267 Member
    no there is no definite answer.

    It is best to weigh uncooked but like many I can't do that...I cook for three and I am not going to be so anal as to dirty 2 extra pots/pans to cook my food special.

    If you are weighing the food cooked...just make sure it's logged as cooked...
  • yarwell
    yarwell Posts: 10,477 Member
    Weighing after cooking is too messy and inconvenient for me, so I weigh ingredients.

    The only "definitive" answer is that you have to use nutritional data that matches the weighed state - so raw numbers for uncooked, and the less available data for cooked by the appropriate method.
  • Eleonora91
    Eleonora91 Posts: 688 Member
    I weight my foods before cooking them because most of the time their volume and weight will change after absorbing water or just while heating. Calories are usually reported for uncooked foods, so if you weight them later, you need to remember that you didn't actually eat that amount. I know there are some typical division factors for cooked rice and pasta but I'd rather cook them after weighting them. Otherwise you can try to look for the "cooked" calories of the same food here on MFP but most of the time you won't find them.

    Sometimes I even have to split my pasta or my veggies with someone else, so I try to weight them before cooking and then giving half to each.
  • Phrick
    Phrick Posts: 2,765 Member
    I cook for my family of 4, everything is weighed prior to cooking - as ingredients go into the recipe I weigh them. I then write down the total pre-cooking weight of the food. I divvy this up into the # of servings I need (4 or whatever) so that I know how many calories are in per serving. Then after it's cooked, I weigh it again, and divide whatever that number is (usually a much smaller number :sad:) by the amount of servings I had figured before, this tells me how much of the cooked food I can eat for the same amount of calories - so our recent cod fish dinner was 732g of cod as the primary ingredient, but once it was all breaded and everything it added up to 803g. Entered 4 servings. This gives me the correct calories for the total recipe. After it was cooked, it weighed just 740g. So 740g/4 = 1 serving of 185g cooked fish.
  • Phrick
    Phrick Posts: 2,765 Member
    Also iif I need to cut a portion of a food before cooking (steak comes to mind) I will cut it, weigh it, write that down, and mark "my" piece with a toothpick so that even after cooking I get the right piece and know the calorie count. Same with chicken or any meat if I'm baking large pieces and I'm only going to have a part of one. I generally fill in my diary for the day first thing in the morning so I have time to play around with exact amounts of how much I'm going to eat, so if I have filled in that I want an 8-oz piece of steak, but then when it comes time to cut off my 8oz piece I accidentally cut only 7.2oz I can adjust everything else in the day to compensate for the lower amounts of protein, fat, etc.

    Saucy recipes or stir fry or fried rice types of things are much tougher but in the end I hope and pray that not being super anal about every last recipe is not going to damage my efforts in the long run. So far it has not!
  • scubasuenc
    scubasuenc Posts: 626 Member
    I weigh before, as I find it more convenient to weigh the ingredients before cooking. If I'm making multiple servings, then I divide the cooked food into individual servings as soon as it is cooked and store the left overs measured. I will use the scale while dividing up the left overs to ensure each serving is as close to the same size as possible.
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  • Phrick
    Phrick Posts: 2,765 Member
    What do you guys do in the case of frozen foods?

    I mean if I was too weigh out a portion of frozen chips, I don't want to have to thaw the whole bag. Does it being frozen add much/any weight?

    I have always assumed that if an item was meant to be cooked from a frozen state (as in the case of tater tots, or the breaded chicken tenders I sometime eat), then it's portion is meant to be weighed in a frozen state. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's what I've done consistently all this time.
  • dratefs
    dratefs Posts: 7 Member
    Thank you all Guys, Still think that is weighing cooked food is convenient for me, regardless messing some extra utensils and not to forget adding extra ingredients to food value
    My practical point is that my way made me lose 55 pounds...Logic...right :drinker:
    Thanks again
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    I do it as per convenience, some dishes I weight cooked and others uncooked. Just make sure to log the corresponding food in the database. Example: if you weight a potato before cooking, enter "potatoes, raw" and if you bake it then weight it "Potatoes, baked" etc.. Sometimes when it's a bit hard to find the exact cooking (or lack of) for a certain ingredient that uses cups instead of weight, I add a custom food from http://nutritiondata.self.com/

    If you are cooking something that already has data on the package, pay attention how the calories are measured there. Example: the calories on pasta packages almost always are for a dry portion.
  • aarondnguyen
    aarondnguyen Posts: 270 Member
    The definite answer is to be consistent.


    If you've always weighed your meats before cooking, then continue to do so. Likewise if you've always weighed them after cooking.

    Just bear in mind that depending on how much you've cooked your meat, you may have dehydrated it to varying extents, so it'll be lighter in comparison to its raw state.

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