Weighing and measuring food

yep, exact for salads as they are all basically close to zero cals anyway.

Takes SFA time.

I am much more relaxed about it during non prep times. Still pretty accurate though as I like to analyse data

What type of diet do you eat? How many ingredients in the average meal? How many raw ingredients that do not contain a label?

No special type, not sure what you mean by this. Ingredients vary a lot--much of the time I cook quickly after working late, so I do a basic meat, veggie (or veggies), and starch, and I don't log herbs and spices. For breakfast I do a vegebtable omelet, fruit, some sort of additional protein (also simple to log and always about the same calories). But sometimes I have time to do fussier meals and I like to on occasion, since I enjoy cooking. I have a variety of cookbooks from which I get ideas (usually I don't do recipes) from a wide range of cuisines.

I'm trying to find out if my diet is very different than that of others who measure everything, because it seems so time consuming and cumbersome to me. Most of my meals are prepared from scratch and many contain a lot of ingredients.

I don't cook from recipes so I may add ingredients at any time in the cooking process based on taste - Oh, it's needs a little more onion - now I need to weigh more onion. That type of thing.

Mine are prepared from scratch, but the average daily meal does not contain a lot of ingredients. Like this evening I just had steak, corn, radicchio, and melon.

I use a lot of ingredients in almost everything I make. Measuring and logging every little thing seems like a lot of trouble. Overwhelming, even.

Have you logged your recipes under the "recipes" tab? I do this for the recipes that use a lot of ingredients. Only have to do it once, then use it again when you cook it again.

I don't know how fast I actually gained the weight - in 2009 (I believe), I weighed 175. Some time later I was 185. Then I got sick and as of last June, I was at 225. By this June, I had dropped 5, so I consider my start weight to have been 220. However I got there, that's 45 pounds in 5 years.

Not a pound a week, but that was mostly hyperbole, based on the rule of thumb that "one pound is 3500 calories". I also have varying levels of activity, so probably burned more calories at some times than others, so the excess varied.

That said, all it takes is a tiny surplus - using the 3500 calorie guide, 50 excess calories a day *every day* is still a pound every 10 weeks, or 5 pounds a year. Most of us don't deliberately eat an excess 50 to 90 calories on a daily basis, but it makes the math easy and it demonstrates how the weight can sneak up on one.

In practice, I put on an average of 9 pounds a year. Since I hadn't weighed myself for some time, I don't know if it was 9 pounds a year or gained all at once, but even at only 9 pounds a year, that's <100 calories a day excess. Since I wasn't logging anything before, and since I have no clue about my burn rate, I may have overstated the excess. Or I may have been spot on and gained some or all of the weight at a faster rate.

Regardless, I recognize that as few as 50 calories a day over what I burn, for a sustained period, will put on the pounds.

Since I'm comparatively sedentary, I need to be aware of what I eat, and how much. One 50 calorie cookie may not be a big deal. Six 50 calorie cookies can be.

Knowledge is power. My favorite cookie from my favorite bakery clocks in at a whopping 450 calories. If I'm going to eat one, I need to be more restrained with the rest of my food choices that day/week.

Sure, portion control and accountability are a hassle. So is frequent grocery shopping to buy only the produce I reasonably expect to eat before it goes bad.

Still better than the alternative.

Now, the rest of the ingredients are all pretty low calorie - salsa, tomato sauce, onion, peppers, celery - and any one of them could be skipped with little impact. But if I skip them ALL, then what is the point? And if I have to weigh each of them, that just ruins the fun of cooking for me.

For low-calorie-density foods like most vegetables, salsa, etc., I use the USDA entries for "large onion," "celery, raw, medium stalk," etc. Even if you're off by 10-20%, it doesn't make much difference.

Don't skip logging them, but don't aim for needless precision by weighing them when you can use portions by size. Just weigh things like meat, cheese, avocado, nuts, and other calorie-dense solid foods, and measure oil, wine, and things like that.

I cook a lot from scratch and have created over 100 recipes in my MFP database over the course of 20 months. Now when I return to one of those recipes, I just edit it (if need be--it's easier to edit on my iPad than on the website, BTW) and reuse it.

I don't see how people say weighing is difficult. I'd encourage you to ask yourself seriously why you're mentally making such a federal case out of it, because realistically it's simply not a big deal at all.

Is there any chance that part of you really just desperately wants to avoid being truly honest with yourself about the actual volume of what you're eating, and possibly have to take responsibility for cutting back?

I'm making pasta primavera tonight. There are 18 ingredients in the recipe, 11 of which vary slightly in weight every time I make it, and one of which is home-made chicken demi glace, which isn't an exactly reproducible product. The cooked pasta weight is slightly different each time, and the sauce reduces by a different amount each time. Which means not only would I have to weigh every ingredient, I'd have to weigh the finished product, then weigh my portion of it and calculate how many servings I ate.

I've done that, and it takes more time than cooking or eating. Especially if MFP is being "sticky" about ingredients/nutrients and forces me to delete the entire recipe and re-enter it before it behaves. I'm not willing to do that every night. Especially since it's impossible to get a completely representative serving.

I put the base recipe in MFP and let it match ingredients, estimated a volume and now I log "pasta primavera, 1 cup" and call it darn well good enough. When my husband cooks stir-fried zucchini and chicken in spicy garlic sauce - I log it as chinese food, by the cup. Some estimates are high, some are low - I don't fuss about it, because I don't eat any single recipe often enough that it dominates my diet.

My commitment is that I weigh myself every day and I follow the 10-day linear weighted moving average as my weight. If my weight isn't doing what I want - I adjust.

LOL I agree 100% that MFP's interface for editing recipes sucks dead donkeys sideways. It's utterly absurd that you can't easily change quantities of ingredients after you add them to the recipe. My recipes with meat vary WIDELY in how much meat I add from one time I cook to the next, because I'm usually cutting up a roast that will vary quite a bit in weight each time I purchase one.

But every time I make prepare a recipe, I go in and edit it with the updated weights. It simply does not take a long time -- unless you are disorganzied. Frankly, the number of ingredients has nothing to do with it. Because weighing each ingredient literally takes only a few seconds. You're chopping and prepping the food anyway -- the weighing part is nothing. It's simply a matter of how organized you are in the kitchen. I will say it probably took me a while to build some new habits to include a weighing plan with my prepping plan, but even at the beginning it simply didn't take long -- it was just frustrating because "Oh, I forgot to get a clean bowl to weigh this ingredient" or "Oh, I put the chopped onions in the bowl with the breadcrumbs before I zeroed out the scale, whoops." But those were my mistakes, my failure to be organized, not the act of weighing itself.

Also, one simple tip: to the greatest extent possible, weigh each ingredient before cooking it, not after cooking. It sounds like maybe you're weighing cooked pasta instead of dry pasta. Weighing cooked foods is a PITA. Not only is the calorie count of cooked foods less accurate (because the cooking method will hydrate / dehydrate foods inconsistently each time you prepare, which will change the weight of the food but not the calorie or nutritional profile), plus you always seem to end up with extra dirty dishes.

LOL I agree 100% that MFP's interface for editing recipes sucks dead donkeys sideways. It's utterly absurd that you can't easily change quantities of ingredients after you add them to the recipe. My recipes with meat vary WIDELY in how much meat I add from one time I cook to the next, because I'm usually cutting up a roast that will vary quite a bit in weight each time I purchase one.

But every time I make prepare a recipe, I go in and edit it with the updated weights. It simply does not take a long time -- unless you are disorganzied.

See the dead donkeys above. Having spent 10 minutes with a list of weights, trying to get MFP to update the calories for the recipe accurately? It's not worth my time. Especially if the issue isn't that I used a different amount of a given vegetable, but that I substituted one ingredient for another? Or changed the number of serving sizes? Those usually mean it's faster to recreate the recipe, and I'm not doing that.

Also, one simple tip: to the greatest extent possible, weigh each ingredient before cooking it, not after cooking. It sounds like maybe you're weighing cooked pasta instead of dry pasta. Weighing cooked foods is a PITA. Not only is the calorie count of cooked foods less accurate (because the cooking method will hydrate / dehydrate foods inconsistently each time you prepare, which will change the weight of the food but not the calorie or nutritional profile), plus you always seem to end up with extra dirty dishes.

No, the issue is that you have to weigh the finished product as well. And then everything you put on your plate. And that portioning foods isn't accurate either. If I took 10% of the pasta, did I also take 10% of the sauce, and 10% of each of the vegetables? No, probably not. All I'm doing is giving myself the illusion of accuracy.

Especially since what really happens is that I make pasta primavera. My daughter eats mostly pasta and sauce, with a few of her favorite vegetables and tastes of the others. My husband eats sauce and veggies, because that fits his low-carb diet and adds a meat. I eat a mix of all of it, but preferentially eat the vegetables that suit my diet best. There's no benefit to trying to model my recipe vs a "standard" primavera.

I also have real concerns about modeling the behavior of compulsively weighing my food. My daughter is 10. That's a hard enough age to be without your mother demonstrating that women weigh and track every morsel that they eat.