Weighing Food Takes Too Long And is OBSESSIVE!

TimothyFish wrote: »

Francl27 wrote: »

The thing is, we're on a calorie counting website, so I have to wonder why it seems so crazy to want to actually be accurate about it. If anything, you're more likely to overeat if you log your food and constantly underestimate everything (as opposed to following a low carb diet or something, where treats are pretty much forbidden and you stick to 'a lot of veggies and lean meats' pretty much)... 'oh look, I ate so little today, I can fit a 200 calorie cinnamon roll'. Except you didn't eat so little, you were already 300 calories over your goal, and your 200 calorie roll is actually 300 calories, so you end up with a tiny deficit and basically eating at maintenance (especially if you ate back all your exercise calories too, and used MFP's number).

Again, obviously it's not a huge deal if you don't eat back exercise calories or if you leave a buffer every day. But a lot of people don't, and think they are a special snowflake that can't lose weight on 1200 calories, that's when using a food scale can really help.

I find that I tend to overeat more frequently when I weigh my food than when I don't. When I don't weigh my food I tend to give myself a bigger margin of error in order to make sure that I'm not overeating.

That can definitely be true too. But you have to know a bit about serving sizes in the first place in order to be able to overestimate them, lol.

Annie_01 wrote: »

MaybeLed wrote: »

I cook and bake a lot, always trying new recipes. Because I'm a Brit, that means weighing things.

So when I decided to lose weight and people said 'use a scale' it wasn't a chore. I don't weigh everything, only calorie dense things but when something is 25% more than it says that adds up.

I do appreciate how if you've not been brought up with that it's a new skill to learn and quickly could become irritating

In other news, when I was baking an American cookie recipe that was a massive chore, working out 1 cup = 250ml by volume and weighing out sugar after I’d guestimated by volume in my old Pyrex jug.
And that was after frantically googling confectioners’ sugar……

For some of us Americans baking and cooking means weighing too. If a recipe doesn't give grams I just convert it. I keep my staples in containers. On the outside I have listed the measurements in grams...40g(1/4 cup)...etc.

It really doesn't always work though. I made a no knead bread recipe using the normal conversion of 1 cup flour = 120g, and I had to throw it away because it was a mess. Turns out you had to use 135-140g for 1 cup. No idea where they got that 'conversion' from, considering that a serving of flour is typically 1/4 cup (30g).

Sigh.

Francl27 wrote: »

The thing is, we're on a calorie counting website, so I have to wonder why it seems so crazy to want to actually be accurate about it.

As a single woman, a lot of my meals aren't cooked from scratch but rather are restaurant meals, meals cooked by family or friends, or meals that I cooked but I used a package of some sort (and in the U.S. nutritional information can be off by as much as 20%). So that box of spaghetti I used to make dinner could have 20% more calories than I think anyways.

I realized when I did attempt to use a food scale for a while for "accuracy" that the only way I was going to get extremely accurate was if I cooked all my meals from scratch and stopped eating packaged foods (that are most likely off), stopped eating out in restaurants, stopped eating foods other people prepared...

It was too much and weighing only some foods (read: dinner when I prepared it at home myself) seemed ridiculously unnecessary when I'm not weighing lunch because it's either take out usually, a prepackaged meal, or something like a sandwich (which at one point I was weighing lunch meat until I realized how ridiculous that was when I was going to eat the whole pack eventually anyways). I don't weigh breakfast because it's usually eggs or yogurt or apples or some combination. So weighing only dinner when I cook it myself seemed unnecessary for me.

But I do realize some people need to weigh things and I always suggest when people are struggling to lose weight to double check their logs.

I have a backup scale now.

elisa123gal wrote: »

weighing food is interesting for a period of time.. educational ... but I have no desire to weigh my corn cob or shrimp shells. lol.. I do think weighing food forever is obsessive.

Can't say I have a lot of desire to, but my body seems to be fond of it (though personally I wouldn't weigh corn cobs or shrimp shells).

hamelle2 wrote: »

I love my scale, it's the math I dislike. Lol
I wish there was an app where you type 214 grams of green apple and it spits out the number of calories.
I guess I could just toss the 14 gms.

The quick fits-all solution is to find a generic green apple entry that gives calories per 100g and looks reliable. (I just checked the database and there are some dodgy apples around.) Then click on the drop-down menu to change the serving size to 1g, and then type in 214 for your number of servings. Hey presto, done!

It works for any amount, no matter how odd the fraction you eat.

If you were making a joke and it just whooshed over my head, ignore this post.