Packaged or home meals?

Get a food scale. Makes tracking really easy!

And play around with the recipe feature. Even just find a simple recipe off the web and use it, just to see.

Check out the Quick Tools (I'm on the web, not sure if it's the same on the app) under each meal in your food diary. You can do things like copy yesterday's meal, or save a meal. So if you usually have coffee with creamer, toast with butter and jam, and a yoghurt, save that as a meal. Then you can add the one meal and they all appear -- you can edit the amounts of each if that varied that day.

I don't think frozen meals are "bad" (although I mean, in my experience, they're really not tasty) but yeah are you going to want to eat them forever? Start small with the learning and build, it gets easier pretty quickly.

I've expressed wanting to cook more (probably with meal planning), but it seems to be about 65/35 in packaged meals for us.

used them for about 3 yrs lost about 60 lbs with runnig

I cook most of my own food, just because I want to get tons of protein in without using up too many calories. It’s easier than you think once you get used to it though. A food scale is a must.

When making a one-off meal, I weigh my protein and then cook it while my pre-weighed side is simmering on the stove (quinoa / lentils / pasta / veggies); boom, done.

For bigger meals I eat for a while, the recipe feature is awesome and makes things easy. I keep a post-it and pencil in the kitchen and just write down every ingredient and its weight. When the food is cooked, I transfer it into storage containers and weigh it. I then figure out how many servings I want out of it and write on another sticky the weight of each serving. Then, when I reheat it, I know how much to portion out.

It sounds a bit convoluted but honestly it barely takes any extra time. There’s nothing wrong with pre-made meals as far as I’m concerned, but I like to get maximum bang for my buck nutritionally so I have room for treats . You might also want to check out some of the recipes posted on the MFP blog. Some of them look really yummy.

Edit: I forgot to mention the recipe software I use on my computer: MacGourmet Deluxe. It’s mac only, I think, but there are plenty of similar ones for windows. Basically, once you save a recipe with all the ingredients, it automatically calculates the nutritional info per serving. It’s an awesome tool to get an idea of the calories/protein/etc in a recipe. A lot of cookbooks nowadays also include nutritional information per serving.

I cook at home and make enough to have leftovers to take for lunch at work. Weighing and measuring seemed like a huge PIA to me too but once I started actually doing it I found that it was not really so bad.

Those frozen meals are nice for a quick lunch but for me they are such small meals for the calories. Making your own food lets you eat more while still keeping calories under wraps.

You can do this!!

Frozen meals are OK in a pinch, for a quick lunch, etc. Fact is you can get more food for fewer calories and less money by making it yourself. A lot of calories in frozen foods is taken up with sauces to enhance the flavor, and fillers like pasta or rice. I much prefer to get more bang for my buck by cooking for myself, though I admit sometimes I'm really tired of cooking, period! LOL

Feistychick68 wrote: »

Ty all btw for your input. I totally agree making ur own food is the healthiest choice. My issue with it is Ik if I'm making let's say spaghetti. I have to figure out how much each individual thing is for my portion. So I will basically have to divide and measure how much meat, spices etc in my particular serving is. I am clearly more lazy and find measuring and calculating each freaking thing a pain in the *kitten*. Would be so nice to say on I had half a cup of noodles and so much sauce so that equals this. I know I'm gonna get frustrated taking out my portion and calculating it ingredient by ingredient. Packaged food seems way easier but is not something I can stick with life long. Props to ppl who have the patience to measure each freaking thing. This is and will be my stumbling block to overcome.... I just am not patient to do it! Ugg

Easier way: weigh all the ingredients, cook it. Weigh the final product in grams. Set the servings to the weight of the final product in grams. All you need to do is weigh what you want to eat, and input the weight of your serving.

Example: My recipe weighs 500 grams. I will put that there are 500 servings in the recipe builder. I put 100 grams on my plate, so I will put in that I ate 100 servings.

2000x easier.

missiontofitness wrote: »

Feistychick68 wrote: »

Ty all btw for your input. I totally agree making ur own food is the healthiest choice. My issue with it is Ik if I'm making let's say spaghetti. I have to figure out how much each individual thing is for my portion. So I will basically have to divide and measure how much meat, spices etc in my particular serving is. I am clearly more lazy and find measuring and calculating each freaking thing a pain in the *kitten*. Would be so nice to say on I had half a cup of noodles and so much sauce so that equals this. I know I'm gonna get frustrated taking out my portion and calculating it ingredient by ingredient. Packaged food seems way easier but is not something I can stick with life long. Props to ppl who have the patience to measure each freaking thing. This is and will be my stumbling block to overcome.... I just am not patient to do it! Ugg

Easier way: weigh all the ingredients, cook it. Weigh the final product in grams. Set the servings to the weight of the final product in grams. All you need to do is weigh what you want to eat, and input the weight of your serving.

Example: My recipe weighs 500 grams. I will put that there are 500 servings in the recipe builder. I put 100 grams on my plate, so I will put in that I ate 100 servings.

2000x easier.

Yup, I do the exact same, except I was way worse at explaining it. Try it out, OP: you might find it’s not as bad as it sounds. Good luck

rockmama72 wrote: »

I cook almost everything, but yesterday I had a Healthy Choice. It was so small!

I get so much more food when I cook my own stuff.