Weighing and Measuring Foods

You're supposed to weigh the uncooked food because that is what the calories/macros are calculated for. You know how much meat shrinks when you cook it, right? Like a hamburger that is half the size it started at? When you weigh an uncooked hamburger patty, and then look it up, it says 4 oz for 219 calories. Now cook that patty and weigh it again- 2.5 oz. So if you weigh out 4 oz of COOKED meat, then you're actually eating almost 40% MORE calories than you're accounting for; in this case about 309.

ETA I only cook for one, so I don't use this, but the common consensus is to weigh everything uncooked, then use those weights to create a recipe. Divide by number of servings and you have your actual intake numbers. PITA, I know. Or you can estimate and hope that's it's close enough.

If you measure and weight the total before, then weight the total after cooking you can work it out. Say you cooked 500 grams worth of chicken.... after you cooked it it weighted 400 grams, you each 100 grams cooked should be be 25% (100/400) so you know the nutrition info on the 500grams so you would log 500*25% = 125 grams of pre-cooked.

Thaw out your frozen meat the night or morning before you use it. Weigh it before you put it in a pan/pot. For frozen vegetables, I just cook them, weigh them, and log them. The difference can't be that much when you're talking about something that has very little calories to start.

I usually cook separate pieces of meat/fish, so one of them is mine. I weigh that one. For stuff like vegetables or mashed potatoes, I'm sometimes more casual and just know what percentage of the whole I ate or try to weigh out what I plan to eat and put it on a particular part of the pan. For something like a stew or sauce I might create a recipe. For pasta or rice you can used cooked weights, just be aware that they are hugely different than the uncooked ones.

Sometimes it's not possible. For example, I use a lot of bone-in meat, and there you have to weigh it cooked (or else I haven't figured out a better way to deal with it). Same with a whole roasted bird or breast (which also has bones). So those I weigh cooked, but if you do this--as others have mentioned--it's important to use cooked weights or else you are understating the calories (in essence assuming that a cooked 4 oz is the same as the identified portion size of 4 oz, when it's really bigger).

The reason you weigh the water you don't eat is that that's what the calories given on the package or for an uncooked entry are based on. In general it's more accurate because people cook meat to different temps and thus some lose more or less water than the cooked entry assumes, but those work fine.

You can used the "cooked" entries in the database and weigh the food cooked but I tend to not trust that as depending on cooking time, cooking method, etc different levels of water can be evaporated.

What I do though is weigh the meat/pasta/whatever before and after. For example, I make salsa chicken in the crockpot for lunches for the week and my bf and I both eat it. I create a recipe in the recipe builder on MFP, weigh the meat (say 30oz) and log that as an ingredient. Then I add the salsa and other ingredients to the recipe and save the recipe as 1 serving. After its cooked, a weigh the entire recipe. Let's say it equals 24oz then I edit the recipe for 24 servings (1 oz each). Now I can weigh the food when I make my lunch. If I get 3 ozs then its 3 servings, 4ozs - 4 servings, etc.

I do this with macaroni and cheese, stir fry, chicken cooked in large amounts, beef, etc. I weigh before and use the nutritional information available and then weigh it afterwards and do the math to figure out how much of the cooked amount equals the raw amount.