Calorie Counting 101

Thanks to having read this thread when I first started, I even weighed xanthan gum when I was cooking yesterday. I don't know that I'd have found doing this as smooth a ride as it's been without these TRULY helpful posts.

cindytw wrote: »

I disagree about weighing the food before cooking...meat especially! Because if you cook meat, A LOT if not all of the fat comes out! Vegetables will not be the same raw or cooked either because they lose water. I think you have to pay attention to your entries, whether they say cooked or raw, and find one that fits what you have. For example, I am not going to log an entry for sausage that claims it has zero of everything but calories!! I know that almond milk has calcium, so if I see a 0 on calcium, I know that entry is bad. If I see a 0 on potassium for greens, I know that entry is bad. You have to be educated and know what you are dealing with!

Good points. I've been wondering whether I should weigh my meat after cooking.

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Verdenal wrote: »

vismal wrote: »

hansel2001 wrote: »

my question is how to you weigh soup say like Campbell's chicken noodle soup weigh the liquid and noodles together or liquid then noodles and add them together just trying not to over think

Many of the soups do not list their nutritional information based by weight, they list it based by volume even though the soup is not 100% liquid. I would either eat half a can, or the whole can of soup and just go off what the nutritional information says for the whole can.

I usually go by the package details, although I know that a certain amount of fudging is permitted. If I wanted to be super-accurate I would buy a cheap scale with a tare function. Put your bowl on the scale, get the weight of the scale, hit tare, pour the soup in the bowl. The scale will subtract the weight of the bowl, leaving you with the weight of the contents.

I don't see how this would be any more accurate than just trusting the label. They can round up/down on calories listed on the label so you're not getting a precise calories per gram anyway. For example, if they say 100 calories per 100 gram serving it's probably between 95 and 104 if you're lucky....I say "if you're lucky" because I believe they are allowed to be off by as much as 20%. And your particular can of soup is likely to have slightly more or less calories than the sample they tested because it might have one more or fewer chunk of potato/meat/whatever than the tested sample.

You can jump through as many hoops as you want chasing 100% accuracy but you aren't going to get it. It's impossible. The label should be a good enough estimate for anyone. And if it isn't good enough then you shouldn't be eating it because there is no way for you to be more accurate. If you're that worried about accuracy you probably need to be making all of your food yourself from scratch.

With 23 pages, I'm sure there's some notorious debate afoot, but all in all, this is good information that I will consider going for.

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