How specific do I need to be with weighing veggies?
abbynormalartist
Posts: 318 Member
I've been making a lot of stir fry lately (consisting of whatever is in the fridge that day) and its a pain to look up and weigh up small portions of oodles of different veggies for one meal. I'm usually very good at tracking / weighing but I'm wondering if I can cheat a bit and use an entry for generic frozen stir fry veggies and just match the overall weight. What do you think? I'm using carrots, zuchinni, peas, broccoli, caulifour, egg plant, cabbage, etc. Not anything too calorie dense.
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I think it really depends on the portion size and the type of veggies, as well as your deficit. If you are close to your goal and have a really small deficit, then you might prefer to be as exact as possible with your weighing. If you're eating a fairly small portion of veggies, or if your veggie serving is generally low-calorie (however you define that), then you might feel more comfortable with a generic measurement.
Odds are, the calorie difference between your veggies and a generic mix is probably not huge, but everyone's definition of "not huge" is going to be different.3 -
Eh...peas I'd weigh. Honestly I'd weigh it all. I use to weigh my damn romaine and spinach but now I only do that like 50% of the time. Everything else though-mushrooms, tomato, zucchini, broccoli. Weighed.
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Honestly, to me it's easier just to weigh everything.
My cutting board fits on the scale. I chop the food, put the cutting board on the scale, tare, scrape the veg into the pan, put the board back on the scale, note the negative, tare, push the next one into the pan, etc. Or put the pan on the scale and tare between additions. If the display is blocked by the pan, I can sit it on a bowl as a riser.
But I eat hundreds of cals a day in veg, so I can't skip them, plus I like tracking fiber & other nutrients, too. If I start making yes/no judgements about which ones to weigh, it'd slow things down, and I'd make mistakes.
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I weigh all my veggies!1
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I'd weigh them all. If you eat those foods a lot, they should be in your diary already (or soon will be), so looking them up is not an issue.
What I'd do -- if being causal and not doing some kind of mise en place -- is put a bowl on the scale, hit tare, chop a veg, add it, note the weight (on the back of an envelope or else I make it a memory game, heh), hit tare, chop another veg, make sure the scale is still on (important!), add the veg, note it, so on.
I don't find this adds meaningful time to just chopping, and it's better for my cooking to have the chopped veg ready to go.
If the order I add them is important (which it often is), I do the chop, weight thing with each ingredient before adding (I use the bowl, but empty it into the pan where everything is cooking in the order I want things to get started before chopping and adding more). Or I might chop ahead and have piles on my cutting board ready to be weighed and added to the pan.
The weighing bit is fun.
I usually use a LOT of veg, though, and not small amounts, so like Ann said it adds up, and more than that I like to be able to look back and see what veg I've been eating and if I'm getting a good variety and so on.
Estimating for most veg is fine, but I find it much more of a hassle than weighing them, and you still have to log them.1 -
I weigh for recipes, but I've been known to just chop off a chunk of English cucumber or grab a handful of cherry tomatoes without bothering to log. At least, for calories. The thing is, I also try to hit my iron RDA daily and I've found iron in surprising (to me!) places.
I had stir-fry for lunch yesterday. And if the only thing I was weighing was the tofu, I would have missed that I'd gotten another 13% of my RDA from stuff like mushrooms and zucchini:
If I didn't weigh them, I might have guessed that I 'probably got some iron out of it,' but I wouldn't know how much.
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I find it simple to weigh. I have a set of metal cups that live on the scale and I just have it there next to the chopping board as I am prepping.2
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Eh...peas I'd weigh. Honestly I'd weigh it all. I use to weigh my damn romaine and spinach but now I only do that like 50% of the time. Everything else though-mushrooms, tomato, zucchini, broccoli. Weighed.
I'd definitely weigh the peas and carrots. I might eyeball or cup the less calorie dense veggies, but peas and carrots can add up quick.1 -
Thanks! I didn't think about noting the negative amount after I chop up my veg. I was weighing my cutting board first, and then by the time I got around to chopping up veggies my scale had turned off and I lost the tared weight of the board.Honestly, to me it's easier just to weigh everything.
My cutting board fits on the scale. I chop the food, put the cutting board on the scale, tare, scrape the veg into the pan, put the board back on the scale, note the negative, tare, push the next one into the pan, etc. Or put the pan on the scale and tare between additions. If the display is blocked by the pan, I can sit it on a bowl as a riser.0 -
estherdragonbat wrote: »I weigh for recipes, but I've been known to just chop off a chunk of English cucumber or grab a handful of cherry tomatoes without bothering to log. At least, for calories. The thing is, I also try to hit my iron RDA daily and I've found iron in surprising (to me!) places.
I had stir-fry for lunch yesterday. And if the only thing I was weighing was the tofu, I would have missed that I'd gotten another 13% of my RDA from stuff like mushrooms and zucchini:
<snip chart>
If I didn't weigh them, I might have guessed that I 'probably got some iron out of it,' but I wouldn't know how much.
...and grapes! Who knew?
I have lot of trouble hitting my Iron - it's the only one I have trouble with...I even started using my cast iron skillet for everything, I hope that's adding some in, because it's hard for me to get above 70% of my iron.
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estherdragonbat wrote: »I weigh for recipes, but I've been known to just chop off a chunk of English cucumber or grab a handful of cherry tomatoes without bothering to log. At least, for calories. The thing is, I also try to hit my iron RDA daily and I've found iron in surprising (to me!) places.
I had stir-fry for lunch yesterday. And if the only thing I was weighing was the tofu, I would have missed that I'd gotten another 13% of my RDA from stuff like mushrooms and zucchini:
If I didn't weigh them, I might have guessed that I 'probably got some iron out of it,' but I wouldn't know how much.
You'd lose the protein that you get from lots of veg (and mushrooms!) too. Definitely a reason to include them.3 -
abbynormalartist wrote: »I've been making a lot of stir fry lately (consisting of whatever is in the fridge that day) and its a pain to look up and weigh up small portions of oodles of different veggies for one meal. I'm usually very good at tracking / weighing but I'm wondering if I can cheat a bit and use an entry for generic frozen stir fry veggies and just match the overall weight. What do you think? I'm using carrots, zuchinni, peas, broccoli, caulifour, egg plant, cabbage, etc. Not anything too calorie dense.
That's basically what I did for thing like that...salads too.1 -
cmriverside wrote: »estherdragonbat wrote: »I weigh for recipes, but I've been known to just chop off a chunk of English cucumber or grab a handful of cherry tomatoes without bothering to log. At least, for calories. The thing is, I also try to hit my iron RDA daily and I've found iron in surprising (to me!) places.
I had stir-fry for lunch yesterday. And if the only thing I was weighing was the tofu, I would have missed that I'd gotten another 13% of my RDA from stuff like mushrooms and zucchini:
<snip chart>
If I didn't weigh them, I might have guessed that I 'probably got some iron out of it,' but I wouldn't know how much.
...and grapes! Who knew?
I have lot of trouble hitting my Iron - it's the only one I have trouble with...I even started using my cast iron skillet for everything, I hope that's adding some in, because it's hard for me to get above 70% of my iron.
I was often below iron on MFP (even though I was eating lots of meat), and now on Cron I seem to hit it even when I eat no animal products. I guess I should compare the goals, but Crons is 18 mg (with an UL of 45 mg), which seems normal.
I think the difference is that on Cron the entries will include it, and that I must have been consuming lots of unlogged iron somehow on MFP. Just mentioning this because it was something that used to bug me on MFP, and I would have said I mostly used the USDA entries.
I don't actually worry about dietary iron much because I get mine tested since my mom had hemochromatosis, which is often genetically linked, I guess. And for that the bigger concern of course is that your body starts building up too much iron.0 -
cwolfman13 wrote: »abbynormalartist wrote: »I've been making a lot of stir fry lately (consisting of whatever is in the fridge that day) and its a pain to look up and weigh up small portions of oodles of different veggies for one meal. I'm usually very good at tracking / weighing but I'm wondering if I can cheat a bit and use an entry for generic frozen stir fry veggies and just match the overall weight. What do you think? I'm using carrots, zuchinni, peas, broccoli, caulifour, egg plant, cabbage, etc. Not anything too calorie dense.
That's basically what I did for thing like that...salads too.
Or you could just weigh it out once and make your own generic entry for about how you do it.4 -
It all depends how accurate you want to be. I am personally not super strict with this type of thing. I actually just entered the recipe and weighed everything the first time I made it. And now every time I make (generally) the same stir fry, I use the same entry to log it. Even though I may be using slightly different quantities or even entirely different veggies. In my mind, weighing every last morsel that goes into my mouth isn’t something I want to be doing for the rest of my life. This is more about creating lifelong habits (for me anyway)2
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I made a recipe called "salad of the week". I use the same bagged salad mix, tomato and cucumber. It's logged for 1 gram =1 serving, so all I do is weigh it out and call it a day. Everything else I weigh.1
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I can easily eat 400 cals from veg in a day. That's about 1/4 of my calories. I weigh them. If ever I'm in a measure-lots-of-things mode, I will take a photo of the tarre'd item on the food scale. Later, when I have time, I can go on MFP and put in the items in order as the pictures show 100 g broccoli, 50 g onion, etc. If you do this for a few days, you should get a good handle on portion size and you can eyeball and just use a custom X calorie entry. Then, if your weight loss slows, you go back to logging everything.3
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At first weighing was difficult, on d it became a habit it was much easier. Now I am using the recipe tool more and do find the weighing getting away from me. I have made my goal weight and as I get more casual with weighing my food (or using recipes) my weight will creep up. Bottom line is, make it a habit and you will have more success with weight loss and maintenance. Realize that weighing in and of itself can be imperfect as a calorie measure.1
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Personally i'd weigh all pulses )peas, beans, etc) as they are rather calorie dense. The rest I'dd weigh in total and find a starry mix that the supermarket has (all veggies) that is similar.0
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I don't weigh any vegetable and I don't calorie count them either unless its a type of potato.0
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