It is a struggle. My family are all on the "skinny" side. They eat pretty much anything with no weight gain. Uggg. I pretty much make dinner for them, than i weigh count measure my food seperatly. Wish there was an easier way...lol

I don't have kids to worry about but me and my skinny husband are eating the same. Now to be clear, he is not skinny because he eats healthily. He always ate far more junk than I did but he is blessed with an incredible metabolism that just burns it all off. Lucky b@st@rd!

Now - he still doesn't need to worry about what he's eating from a weight perspective, but he has joined MFP so that whoever cooks can log recipes and I can get an accurate calorie count. We don't bother logging herbs and spices, which usually form the longest part of the ingredients list for us - we're talking single digit calories across the whole dish, it's not worth the effort.

And of course, we only have to create the recipe once! Even if it's slightly different next time - MFP allows you to amend the recipe very easily and you can even do a 'save as' under a different name so you can keep both versions. My recipe tab is full of stews/curries of the same kind that I batch cook and freeze so that I'll have the exact count for that version (because a lot of my stews are made up and depend on what I have in stock!)

I don't go to the extent of weighing out the portions, but I know I'm eating roughly half of what we've cooked, for me it's good enough. And if he wants a bit extra he can have a piece of bread to mop up the sauce or eat more fruit after dinner. (He also has much more substantial lunches than I do but we're both at our workplaces so that's no bother.) A key thing for me is to work out the calories in the recipe before I eat my lunch - if dinner is high calorie, I can reduce what I eat at lunch or what I snack on to compensate.

And sometimes yes, husband will eat more of a component of dinner - generally whatever 'carb' we are having. Last night was a middle-eastern meal served with wholemeal flatbread - I had one flatbread, he had two.

I eat most of my dinners with my mom (single and no kids so why not?). For lunch and breakfast I weigh things, etc. But dinner is much more tricky. I put recipes into MFP and ask her what she used in her recipe to get as close as possible. For me, weighing every single thing I eat is just not sustainable. I know some people swear by it and I have used the scale to see what an actual serving looks like and that helps me to get my servings as accurate as possible.

I do pretty much the exact same thing as @bmeadows380 with weighing some items like meat, and I'll do pasta like spaghetti, but then I'm more about having a certain number of portions. If you know you're having about a fifth, you can say the recipe serves 5 and get your count. I do a lot of one-pot meals and will scoop them out across dishes so that I know each dish has 2 scoops or whatever so that it's a specific number of portions, but that only works if your family is okay with you serving up their meals! When we're trying to lose as much a we in this group are, I think we can't get too bogged down with each and every calorie. Your values might not be 100.00% perfect, but as long as they're close, you'll be able to lose and be dieting to live, not living to diet.