Lesson learned : always count BEFORE you eat

I always work out my calories before I make or during making the recipe, even when those recipe sites offer nutritional info at the bottom, I often find it vastly different from my own.

I have always pre logged for this reason. It also makes you think twice about whether the calories are worth the satisfaction of eating the food. It is a great tool for me to prevent overeating.

bmeadows380 wrote: »

KrissFlavored wrote: »

I always work out my calories before I make or during making the recipe, even when those recipe sites offer nutritional info at the bottom, I often find it vastly different from my own.

me too - I actually never bother to look at the nutritional information provided for a recipe. I also like to make substitutes for ingredients, and the calorie counts can differ even on the same thing made by two different brands!

I don't even use my own built in recipes without double checking them as I know I don't always use exactly the same amount of a particular ingredient every time.

Yeah. I often make substitutions also.

Like today, I made a recipe for pizza pasta in the instapot, the recipe called for ground italian sausage, but I wondered if maybe I could replicate the flavor using ground chicken.

Sure enough, there was a recipe lol. So I made that instead, it cut the calories for the ground meat required by half and still came out just as tasty. When I created the food for it for my logs I called it "Faux Italian sausage"

Still came out looking tasty




Also I made some spicy thai chicken tenders today. The recipe called for two cups of oil, I'm assuming for them to be deep fried in a dutch oven or whatever, but I figured I could probably get a decent result with using much less.



Which they did, came out quite nice using 1/4 cup of oil, for 2lbs of chicken tenders



End result. Perfect chicken fingers with way less calories.

Although I tend to make things exactly the same so I dont have to keep playing around with entries.. so I always create my own foods and I list what I used if I made adjustments. Or if the recipe uses things like oz. Lol cause everything here is ml.

jelleigh wrote: »

Join me for a small cautionary tail of why pretracking is a good idea:

I've bee off grains for over a month now (dr prrscribed ) and last night got a hankering for some good old crackers. Something crunchy and salty you know? Remembered I saw some grain free cracker recipes on Pinterest and whipped up a batch. They were mostly succesful. Yay me! Went great with guac.
Dawned on me this am that a cup of almond flour is not a small amount. Fed it all into MFP and those dang crackers cost me 750 cals!! Before the guac!!!

And that my friends, is why you ALWAYS figure out your totals BEFORE eating .

(Ok well maybe just for new recipes where you have no clue what it's worth)
Anyone else have this happened? Any seemingly obvious lessons you've learned the hard way?

Mostly that there seems to always be another lesson to learn and that when I make my next mistake I should just laugh at how dumb it will likely be, learn from it, and move on.

I have gotten pretty good at ballparking recipes if I have experience with the ingredients. I would not have caught the crackers though. Crackers provide so little satiation for the calories they cost I almost never eat them.

jelleigh wrote: »

Great insight everyone. The crazy thing is that I can't even blame poor nutrition info on the recipe. I literally just didn't look? And then ate THE WHOLE BATCH. Then didn't log. Then woke up the next day and thought huh,I bet a whole cup of almond flour is high cal! Ugh. So silly

I think those kinds of things are helpful though. One of the mistakes I made in the past was consider weight loss to be fragile. That idea would make me give up after a single night of eating way too much food. I thought I had blown it. Weight loss is not fragile and can withstand a lot of mistakes... I should know... I made most of them.

I rarely pre-log. These days, I have a pretty good intuition for how things are going to turn out. Once in a while, if I want to be sure to be in-bounds, I'll pre-check some specific unusual thing.

But one thing I feel pretty secure about, at this point: One day, one "oops", in the big picture, is pretty meaningless. A drop in the sea. If I'm over my calorie goal, even lots over my calorie goal, it's no big deal, as long as it's a rare thing. And yes, it can be a learning experience - some of those are painful, but learning's still good for us.

Guilt and self-recrimination, not to mention self-hatred, are 100% optional. And they feel icky, so why do them?

About the only thing I remember being truly surprise by (but probably shouldn't have been) was that the fancy amendments-added real-ice-cream milkshake I drank after a race was around 850 calories all by itself. (It was still fine, but yeah, I learned something.)