Calorie counting while cooking ethnic food?
Mayg09
Posts: 2 Member
Hi everyone,
I've been part of FP for a while, mostly using it for tracking my weight- never really for food.
Well I'm now 9 months postpartum and actually weigh more now then I did when I gave birth.
Breastfeeding didn't make me lose weight, and although I'm working out regularly I'm realizing nutrition needs to come first.
I'm done breastfeeding now so I can commit fully to this, but now I need motivation bc the process seems so daunting.
Mainly... My issue is that I rarely ever eat out and love to cook. I throw things together, never measuring, and use that to meal prep.
For those of you who are first generation Americans and eat ethnic food- how does calorie counting work for you?
How on earth can I track my calories in a realistic way? I'm looking for stories, motivation.. whatever you did that worked for you.
Thanks in advance!
I've been part of FP for a while, mostly using it for tracking my weight- never really for food.
Well I'm now 9 months postpartum and actually weigh more now then I did when I gave birth.
Breastfeeding didn't make me lose weight, and although I'm working out regularly I'm realizing nutrition needs to come first.
I'm done breastfeeding now so I can commit fully to this, but now I need motivation bc the process seems so daunting.
Mainly... My issue is that I rarely ever eat out and love to cook. I throw things together, never measuring, and use that to meal prep.
For those of you who are first generation Americans and eat ethnic food- how does calorie counting work for you?
How on earth can I track my calories in a realistic way? I'm looking for stories, motivation.. whatever you did that worked for you.
Thanks in advance!
1
Replies
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I am not American (first generation or otherwise) but the way you describe cooking is pretty much how I approached it most of my life. - Stir fry? Cut veggies I like, throw things for sauce together and taste. Soups and stews? Throw things in a pot with stock. Pasta? Pasta in one pot, fry onion, add veggies of choice and tomato sauce ingredients... No measurements, just "till it tastes right".
For calorie counting this approach to cooking simply is not the best. Now if I make stir fry I still think "those veggies should work", but I weigh them while cooking (in a bowl on the scale before I throw them in the pan. I meassure out oil, weigh sauce ingredients (years if cooking by feel have made me pretty good in estimating how much "till it tastes right" is, even if I have no idea how much it wrighs or what the volume of it is.) - Same with every other thing I cook.
It adds a bit of extra time to the cooking process, but honestly, after getting used to it it is not too hard or annoying.10 -
I weigh most ingredients before cooking. But for things like sauces added 'a little bit' and then 'a little bit more' I take notes during cooking. I put the bottle/container on the kitchen scales, tare, add what I want to add to the dish and then pop the container back on the scales. I write down the amount, but if I want to add more of that ingredient I'll go through the same process again. My notes will say for example 15+7+8 and then I add it all up to add to my recipe.8
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It doesn't matter if you're cooking ethnic food or not. It all has calories and you approach it in the same way. Get a digital food scale. Learn to use the recipe builder on MFP.
Pick a day when you've got a little more time. Pick a recipe you use often. Keep a notepad handy. Take your first ingredient and weigh it--jot it down, second same, and so on. Be especially careful to weigh or measure oils, fats, sugars, etc. because they are calorie dense for small amounts.
Then in another free moment plug that recipe into the recipe builder. A big question is how many portions? If you can weigh the entire dish (take off the weight of the container) and then split it into 100 gram increments----example: my entire dish weighs 700g so I put that down as 7 portions. When I take out my portion I weigh it--Example: 150g that's 1.5 of a portion. 200g would be 2 portions. 80g would be .8 of a portion.
That recipe should be "saved" and then you can just go to your recipes and click on it and register your portion for the day. It's so easy once you do the work. A recipe can be modified if you change it up, but if you're making a small change you can just modify your food diary. It's important that you have the calories for the base recipe. As you do this with your most used foods you will come to realize how big your portion can be and how many calories it is. You will then expand into substituting less caloric ingredients here and there.
If you want to lose weight, you do have to know how many calories you're eating a day. Good luck.5 -
it doesnt matter what you are cooking.
learn how to weigh the food on a food scale and find accurate entries in the database and use the recipe builder.
i use the recipe builder pretty much every day.
8 -
Mainly... My issue is that I rarely ever eat out and love to cook. I throw things together, never measuring, and use that to meal prep.
Scales. It takes some of the joy out of cooking, especially if you're making something complicated, but there's no way around it.
I tend to plan out my recipe roughly now, to estimate the calories, then adjust it as I add ingredients so the quantities are correct. It's not as much fun, but it keeps calories down as often I'll change an ingredient or reduce its quantity to save on calories.
Batch cooking helps a little - I record the calories for the whole batch, then split things (and weigh them to make sure it's an even split).1 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »it doesnt matter what you are cooking.
learn how to weigh the food on a food scale and find accurate entries in the database and use the recipe builder.
i use the recipe builder pretty much every day.
This3 -
Weigh your raw, prepared (i.e. thawed/chopped/shredded/sliced/etc, but not cooked) ingredients and write it down. I keep a little pad of paper and a pen near my cooking area, write down a list of all of the ingredients I'm using, and then weigh them out and note down the weight in grams to get my mise en place together before I start cooking. If I have more than one thing going into the pot at the same time, I'll put it in the same prep bowl and tare between ingredients - e.g., if I'm making something that involves onion, carrot, and celery going into the pot all at once, my order of operations is thus:
1. Place bowl on scale and turn on/tare.
2. Dice onion.
3. Put diced onion in bowl on scale.
4. Write down weight of onion in grams.
5. Tare scale.
6. Chop carrot.
7. Put chopped carrot with onion in bowl on scale.
8. Write down weight of carrot in grams.
9. Tare scale.
10. Chop celery.
11. Put chopped celery with carrot and onion in bowl on scale.
12. Write down weight of celery in grams.
For things you kind of have to eyeball, like cooking spray/oil, sauces, spices, etc., I'll put the whole container on the scale, tare it, add however much feels right to the thing I'm cooking, then put the container back on the scale. It will show a negative amount, that's how much oil/spice/sauce I used because it's no longer in the bottle (i.e, the bottle weighs that much less now), so I write that down. Make sure to weigh the container in the same configuration both times - i.e., if you weigh it with the lid on first, put the lid back on before weighing it again.
Then, when I'm done cooking, I weigh the entire finished dish, either by transferring it from the cooking vessel to a new container or by weighing out portions. I keep meaning to take a day and weigh all my pots and pans so I can just weigh the whole thing and subtract the weight of the vessel to know how much food is in it. I'll enter the recipe here with all the raw ingredient weights and define the servings in terms of per gram, per 10g, or per 100g, depending on how much I ended up with. So if I make a batch of, e.g., curry, and it comes out to 2,345 grams total, I'll enter the recipe per gram, 2345 servings; if it's 2340, per 10g, 234 servings; if it's 2300, per 100g, 23 servings.
It slows you down at first, but it's easy to get used to doing it, and eventually you'll be able to more accurately guesstimate if you do forget to weigh something at some point.7 -
Yep. What they say. My ethnic food of fried chicken and cornbread might not be your ethnic food of sashlik or veronyky (sp!) but it all works the same.
Dang now I have a craving for katchapuri.4 -
First, I want to thank you all for you detailed responses. I read them all and have gained a consensus that I need to buy a scale.
In all honesty that sounds like a nightmare to me, but I guess it needs to be done.
I should also clarify, the reason why wrote the bit about being a first generation American and ethnic food in particular is because the recipes that my mom gives me are literally just like "a bit of that, a bunch of this etc." And I find that others with immigrant parents can relate.0 -
I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING
So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL 0 -
SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.5 -
SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.
I knowwww
Problem is I'm not at that stage where I can control my rice and roti portions sizes. One cup of rice with a curry is like eating a bowl of curry soup with rice floating around But im training myself...to still enjoy the taste of my favorite foods and once I get the appetite controlled I will slowly add back some rice...not the whol dang rice field! 3 -
First, I want to thank you all for you detailed responses. I read them all and have gained a consensus that I need to buy a scale.
In all honesty that sounds like a nightmare to me, but I guess it needs to be done.
I should also clarify, the reason why wrote the bit about being a first generation American and ethnic food in particular is because the recipes that my mom gives me are literally just like "a bit of that, a bunch of this etc." And I find that others with immigrant parents can relate.
Heh, I don't have immigrant parents but I can relate a little bit. I got a bunch of cookbooks from the 1920s-1950s from my grandma recently (some even belonged to my great grandma!) and her handwritten instructions, in addition to being illegible at times, are things like "enough flour until batter becomes stiff" Basically requires me dumping a bunch of flour in a separate bowl, weighing it, using just enough, and then weighing the remaining flour. Yep..a little tedious for sure, but after years of using my scale it's become a bit second nature and now I feel weird NOT doing it. Lol7 -
I hear you, here's how I got around it: weigh your ingredients while using the "bit of this, bit of that" method, then remember the proportions for next time (or write them down if your memory is like mine).(...) I should also clarify, the reason why wrote the bit about being a first generation American and ethnic food in particular is because the recipes that my mom gives me are literally just like "a bit of that, a bunch of this etc." And I find that others with immigrant parents can relate.
I don't think it takes any joy out of cooking, on the contrary it makes it easier to consistently get the same flavour.
Also, this may be a bit controversial but I don't think you need super-accuracy for things such as vegetables, mushrooms or most seasonings. I put onions in practically everything and never weigh them, simply buy average-sized ones, remember how many I chopped up and log it as "X/portions onions, medium". Let the law of large numbers work for you
3 -
SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.
I knowwww Problem is I'm not at that stage where I can control my rice and roti portions sizes. One cup of rice with a curry is like eating a bowl of curry soup with rice floating around But im training myself...to still enjoy the taste of my favorite foods and once I get the appetite controlled I will slowly add back some rice...not the whol dang rice field!
Try making cauliflower rice and mixing it with normal rice. I make curries in bulk and freeze in me-sized portions. I cook white rice in bulk and freeze in 100g portions. If I want more (or I don't have enough cals left for a portions of rice), I add (or use) cauliflower rice.
OP, I'm not American or first generation anything, but I have a number of recipes from my mum and from an uncle that add a bit of this and a bit of that. I do what's suggested above - put my spice jar on the scales, turn the scales on, take out 'a bit of this' and note how much I've taken. If your scales aren't super-sensitive, you may need to turn the scales on, then put the jar on, see what it weighs to start with and then see how much is left. My scales don't register anything until it gets to 2g.
Once you have a recipe in MFP, it's there to use next time; if the next time you make that particular recipe you think you're using pretty much the same quantity of each ingredient, you don't need to weigh everything again. Accurate measurements become more relevant as you get closer to goal weight and your deficit gets smaller but, initially, at least you'd be tracking with figures that are probably close enough.2 -
Strudders67 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.
I knowwww Problem is I'm not at that stage where I can control my rice and roti portions sizes. One cup of rice with a curry is like eating a bowl of curry soup with rice floating around But im training myself...to still enjoy the taste of my favorite foods and once I get the appetite controlled I will slowly add back some rice...not the whol dang rice field!
Try making cauliflower rice and mixing it with normal rice. I make curries in bulk and freeze in me-sized portions. I cook white rice in bulk and freeze in 100g portions. If I want more (or I don't have enough cals left for a portions of rice), I add (or use) cauliflower rice.
OP, I'm not American or first generation anything, but I have a number of recipes from my mum and from an uncle that add a bit of this and a bit of that. I do what's suggested above - put my spice jar on the scales, turn the scales on, take out 'a bit of this' and note how much I've taken. If your scales aren't super-sensitive, you may need to turn the scales on, then put the jar on, see what it weighs to start with and then see how much is left. My scales don't register anything until it gets to 2g.
Once you have a recipe in MFP, it's there to use next time; if the next time you make that particular recipe you think you're using pretty much the same quantity of each ingredient, you don't need to weigh everything again. Accurate measurements become more relevant as you get closer to goal weight and your deficit gets smaller but, initially, at least you'd be tracking with figures that are probably close enough.
I'll try this...although i DID manage to weigh out 4.5 oz of cooked rice today and it looked like a lot more than I imagined it would... I always picture half a cup of rice to be this tiny amount in measuring cups but when I weigh it i get a lot more!
Thanks for taking the time to share your wisdom!0 -
SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »Strudders67 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.
I knowwww Problem is I'm not at that stage where I can control my rice and roti portions sizes. One cup of rice with a curry is like eating a bowl of curry soup with rice floating around But im training myself...to still enjoy the taste of my favorite foods and once I get the appetite controlled I will slowly add back some rice...not the whol dang rice field!
Try making cauliflower rice and mixing it with normal rice. I make curries in bulk and freeze in me-sized portions. I cook white rice in bulk and freeze in 100g portions. If I want more (or I don't have enough cals left for a portions of rice), I add (or use) cauliflower rice.
OP, I'm not American or first generation anything, but I have a number of recipes from my mum and from an uncle that add a bit of this and a bit of that. I do what's suggested above - put my spice jar on the scales, turn the scales on, take out 'a bit of this' and note how much I've taken. If your scales aren't super-sensitive, you may need to turn the scales on, then put the jar on, see what it weighs to start with and then see how much is left. My scales don't register anything until it gets to 2g.
Once you have a recipe in MFP, it's there to use next time; if the next time you make that particular recipe you think you're using pretty much the same quantity of each ingredient, you don't need to weigh everything again. Accurate measurements become more relevant as you get closer to goal weight and your deficit gets smaller but, initially, at least you'd be tracking with figures that are probably close enough.
I'll try this...although i DID manage to weigh out 4.5 oz of cooked rice today and it looked like a lot more than I imagined it would... I always picture half a cup of rice to be this tiny amount in measuring cups but when I weigh it i get a lot more!
Thanks for taking the time to share your wisdom!
If you're weighing your rice cooked, make sure you're using an entry for cooked rice.1 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »Strudders67 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »SunnyBunBun79 wrote: »I'm first gen American, from India...It's very hard to eat Indian food without rice or roti or wheat bread... SO I AM STRUGGLING So as a result I am eating mostly salads but cooking the proteins with Indian seasoning but keeping them dry so that I dont need rice to eat with the gravy..sigh.. BUT I MISS my white carbs LOL
@SunnyBunBun79
You don't have to change what you eat to lose weight - you have to change how much you eat.
Making a hard job harder is rarely the way to success, minimise the struggle if you can.
I knowwww Problem is I'm not at that stage where I can control my rice and roti portions sizes. One cup of rice with a curry is like eating a bowl of curry soup with rice floating around But im training myself...to still enjoy the taste of my favorite foods and once I get the appetite controlled I will slowly add back some rice...not the whol dang rice field!
Try making cauliflower rice and mixing it with normal rice. I make curries in bulk and freeze in me-sized portions. I cook white rice in bulk and freeze in 100g portions. If I want more (or I don't have enough cals left for a portions of rice), I add (or use) cauliflower rice.
OP, I'm not American or first generation anything, but I have a number of recipes from my mum and from an uncle that add a bit of this and a bit of that. I do what's suggested above - put my spice jar on the scales, turn the scales on, take out 'a bit of this' and note how much I've taken. If your scales aren't super-sensitive, you may need to turn the scales on, then put the jar on, see what it weighs to start with and then see how much is left. My scales don't register anything until it gets to 2g.
Once you have a recipe in MFP, it's there to use next time; if the next time you make that particular recipe you think you're using pretty much the same quantity of each ingredient, you don't need to weigh everything again. Accurate measurements become more relevant as you get closer to goal weight and your deficit gets smaller but, initially, at least you'd be tracking with figures that are probably close enough.
I'll try this...although i DID manage to weigh out 4.5 oz of cooked rice today and it looked like a lot more than I imagined it would... I always picture half a cup of rice to be this tiny amount in measuring cups but when I weigh it i get a lot more!
Thanks for taking the time to share your wisdom!
If you're weighing your rice cooked, make sure you're using an entry for cooked rice.
thank you, will do0 -
Just want to say that my mum's cooking directions were the same. "Some" of this and "a handful" of that. Her favourite instruction is "a bunch of..." . Think it's just mums in general who are that way, as she's 9th generation Canadian
So I do still cook that way, but I weigh it as I go. It's the only way.
0 -
[/quote] If you're weighing your rice cooked, make sure you're using an entry for cooked rice. [/quote]
I have a recipe in the recipe builder and use that. That way I can enter the brand of rice that I've got and the raw weight that I cooked, and know that the nutritional info matches what the packet says. I then set it to 6, 7, 8 portions or however many bags went in to the freezer. When I add rice to my MFP diary, I select my recipe entry. I don't cook another batch until I've finished the previous one.
At 100g, I doubt the brand makes a lot of difference to nutritional info but, I agree, there's a big difference between 100g raw and 100g cooked rice!
Although I said above that I cook white rice in bulk, which is partly true and is something I've actually done for more than 10 years (long before I joined MFP), more recently I've been cooking 200g of white rice and 200g of brown rice then mixing them together and bagging up 9 portions, which may or may not be exactly 100g (but the bags will all weigh the same). This mix increases my fibre intake very, very slightly. I use the same 'rice' recipe entry and just added an extra ingredient to it.0 -
I used the recipe builder very often as I primarily cook at home. When I did a recipe, I would more or less concern myself with the ingredients that were providing the main calorie content of what I was making...the oils and fats, meat, more calorie dense vegetables like potatoes, etc. I never really worried about how much of this spice or that spice or herb, or even low calorie vegetables in most cases. In my case, while not entirely accurate, it was more than good enough...that said, my calorie targets to lose weight were pretty much anywhere from 2300-2500 calories per day, so I had some room to work with.0
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