Question re: Calories in cooked sweet potato?

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cozyfiend
cozyfiend Posts: 2 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hi all, I have a bit of a situation that I haven’t encountered before. Normally when I’m cooking and logging, I weigh and log all of my ingredients raw and choose the corresponding raw entries so that loss of water / etc during cooking doesn’t mess with the calorie count for my day. Fine, dandy, no big deal.

However, I found a recipe that I’m hyped to try for sweet potato boats. It involves slicing a sweet potato in half, baking for 50 minutes, and then scooping out some of the sweet potato to accommodate a quinoa-spinach filling. How can I accurately track the sweet potato that I’ll be eating after I scoop out the middle? Plus, I want to use the scooped out middles to make sweet potato smoothies, so I’ll need to find a way to accurately track what’s going into my smoothie.

What would you do?

Would doing conversion factors like its college chem lab help in this situation? Like (x grams raw middle / 100 grams raw whole potato) = (50 grams cooked middle / 90 grams cooked potato) solve for X and log X? Am I overthinking this because I’m tired? Please advise haha

Replies

  • Smacfit_
    Smacfit_ Posts: 101 Member
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    I personally would look up the calorie count for cooked sweet potato! Then weigh each portion to get your correct cals and macros. Keep it simple! :)
  • dkabambe
    dkabambe Posts: 544 Member
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    Previous suggestion seems most sensible.

    Otherwise if you want to stick to raw measurements and you've weighed the overall potato you can just guess the amount you scoop out. As long as you put the same amount back in for your smoothie it will all average out in the end - though it may be a slight overestimate one day, it will balance out with an underestimate another and not affect your overall progress, (and if both on same day make no difference at all!).
  • Strongfitmama100412
    Strongfitmama100412 Posts: 90 Member
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    Cant you just build a recipe? I tend to to do that. Im ok with rough estimates though.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,151 Member
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    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    What I would do is weigh raw, weigh cooked and then weigh the amount I removed to determine the percentage of the actual sweet potato I was eating. Then I'd log that percentage of the raw sweet potato.

    If that seems like a hassle, just use the cooked entry: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list/?manu=&fgcd=&ds=&qlookup=Sweet potato, cooked, baked in skin, flesh, without salt

    This percentage method is what I do in similar situations, like if I'm sharing a giant sweet potato or using it over several days.
  • callsitlikeiseeit
    callsitlikeiseeit Posts: 8,627 Member
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    im okay with approximate counts.

    id create it in the recipe builder and just use that. itll be a few calories more than you eat, but i dont see an issue with that lol makes up for logging inaccuracies elsewhere most likely
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,898 Member
    edited January 2019
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    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    What I would do is weigh raw, weigh cooked and then weigh the amount I removed to determine the percentage of the actual sweet potato I was eating. Then I'd log that percentage of the raw sweet potato.

    If that seems like a hassle, just use the cooked entry: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list/?manu=&fgcd=&ds=&qlookup=Sweet potato, cooked, baked in skin, flesh, without salt

    The USDA cooked entry is accurate enough for me :)
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,964 Member
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    Well, I always use an entry for cooked sweet potato flesh from the USDA, so I would probably weigh the whole baked potato, weigh the amount I removed and subtract that, then weigh the leftover skin when I was done eating and subtract that to get the final cooked flesh weight for the first meal (no, I don't eat sweet potato skin -- I've got much tastier ways of getting fiber, thank you).

    If I ate skin and used raw entries for sweet potato and I were planning on eating the extra sweet potato in a smoothie during the same week (between the same two weigh-ins as the sweet potato boat), I would just log the entire raw sweet potato for the "boat" meal and not log it when I made the smoothie. I do this sometimes with meals when I'm planning on using the leftovers the next day. Like last week I stir-fried some thin-cut pork loin with a carrot and some garlic, and ate half for dinner and half for lunch the next day. I logged all the oil, corn starch, carrot, and garlic plus half the raw weight of the pork for dinner the first day, then just logged the other half of the pork for lunch the next day. And -- gasp!! -- I just eyeballed what half was when I served myself. Since I don't weigh myself daily, it doesn't throw off my data.
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
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    If it was just me eating the boats and smoothies, I would weigh the original potato, guess what fraction of it I ate in each form, and know that it would all get logged eventually.
  • placeboBL
    placeboBL Posts: 62 Member
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    I would weigh the sweet potato raw and log the appropriate fraction used for the recipe. Then log the inverse fraction when making the smoothies — if you used 3/4 for the recipe, log 1/4 for the smoothie.

    Since you will eat the entire sweet potato over the course of a couple of days, presumably, it won’t really matter. The total calories consumed will be the same.

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