Weight Frozen Foods - Before or After!?

What do you mean by "frozen foods?" If you mean those pre-packaged dinner things, the calories/nutritional information should be on the back of the box (and if not, it should be easy to find online).

If you mean "frozen foods" as in "I took a chicken breast out of the freezer," you should weigh it after thawing, but before cooking. Things like shrimp are particularly hard to weigh while frozen - I learned that when I measured out 3 ounces of frozen shrimp, cooked it, then weighed it again and discovered it was only 1.2 ounces. The ice added to the weight, so it was impossible to weigh correctly.

You can't really weigh/measure cooked meat, because it "shrinks" after cooking and will weigh less. Almost all calorie/nutritional counts are for pre-cooked/raw food, so weighing or measuring after cooking will royally mess up your results. Anything else (like frozen vegetables), the calorie count should be directly on the package, and it should explicitly say whether it's the pre-cooked or cooked volume/weight, so that's what you should follow.

It has 370 calories. It's right on the box. I looked it up online. You don't need to weigh frozen meals, as they have the calorie count. Just enter the name of the product--Udi's Broccoli & Kale Lasagna--right into MFP and it will add the calories for you.

Weight of frozen food does NOT change when it's thawed out unless there is significant draining of liquid. The few grams from chicken blood melting away doesn't really affect calories too much if you weigh it before or after. However, COOKED food will weigh very differently from its raw form so you need to make sure you pick the correct option when you are logging your calories.

I weigh mine before cooking as the weight is much less after cooking. For instance, my hubby loves these frozen battered green beans and I have to weigh my portion ahead of time OR divide the cooked weight by the number of servings because the cooked weight is 1/3 less. If I measure after, I'm going to have much more than one serving.

For meals like yours, I would enter it as the full amount this time. I find most things to be fairly accurate or even a smidgen less.

This is my pain in the *kitten*. I am buying a lot of frozen minced meat and frozen meat or veggies in general. When the manufacturer has a label is it for frozen or unfrozen. I have frozen chicken drumsticks... do I need to weigh them every time after they get defrosted? When I aam to do a soup I just pop them in the water...

My experience with weighing foods is that it is far too complex and all just an approximation. I still do it though just to be clear. Just googling some of the basic foods will net you all kinds of different values, so how do you know which one is right? Even all the TDEE numbers an calories burned are all estimates. So what has worked for me, which may not be for everyone is to have the exact same exerciser routine/meals week after week. This doesn't mean that you have to eat the same thing every day, but it means every week, you eat the same set of food you choose. After a couple of weeks or preferably month, you will know if your eating maintenance calories or surplus or deficit. From there, you can choose to burn more calories or eat less calories. My recommendation is just adjust by a little a time. The 500 calories deficit a day just seems too extreme for me.