Calorie counting meals with sauce or marinade that is mostly not consumed

As a Belgian, I take offense at any recipe that includes cream in moules marinières 😛

For me it's simple, I don't actually log the liquid (in my case just wine, mussel juice, and a bit of oil) unless I actually decide to drink some of it.
In case I drink some of it (which is most times, because the mussel juice is delicious!) I weigh the portion of liquid, choose a generic fish stock entry and add some oil and wine, proportionate to the total amount of liquid (having measured the oil and wine while cooking).

It's a bit of guesswork really 🤷

When practical, I make separate recipe entries for foods and the sauces they're served with or cooked in and weigh out how much I actually use. For something like this, where the sauce stays on the plate while you eat the food, you could weigh the plate before and after eating, if you wanted to get that granular with it. Or, yeah, just log as if you ate all of the sauce and treat yo' self to something small after dinner or the next day to balance it out, since you're in maintenance.

sofrances wrote: »

I really love mussels, or "moules marinière". But although the sauce has a bunch of wine and cream in it, the way you eat it you generally don't consume most of the sauce - its just a flavouring for the mussels.

Does anyone have a good way of calorie counting meals like this, with a large unconsumed element?

Other examples would be foods with marinades, where a lot of the marinade gets thrown away.

If I was trying to lose weight, I'd just say count it as if you're consuming it all, and you might lose a little more than usual that day. But in maintenance, I'm not looking to lose weight, so this strategy isn't optimal.

How often do you eat things that pose that question? Unless it's very frequent, I'd suggest you adopt either of the "log it all" or "log none of it" strategies above, or decide to log a percentage of it, and be consistent about that.

Then, watch the bodyweight scale *trend* over multi-week time periods, and adjust to stay in a consistent range of a few pounds most of the time, with perhaps an upper red-line weight that is your trigger to cut back a bit for a couple of weeks.

Unless you eat foods like this every day, and on the heavy-calorie end of the scale you describe (full cream, oil, butter kind of stuff), this is worrying about numbers that are arithmetically down in the range of inevitable logging error. What logging error? One apple is sweeter than the next, at the same weight; a portion of (whatever) has more nuts in it because of how the servings are split; one walk/bike has more hills or headwind so burns a handfull more calories than last outing; and that sort of thing. It's useful to make intelligent estimates, but it's all estimates, in the end.

Just adopt a reasonable, consistent way of logging these things, and watch the scale; adjust if necessary based on results. That would be my advice, from year 5+ of maintenance at a healthy weight. It's not worth a lot of stress or anxiety, IMO.

Best wishes!

How can you not eat all that wonderful sauce???! With loads of bread dipped into it so you can soak up every drop. *misses point of thread entirely*

There is also little advice from myself: Try to count food weight in KG instead of LBS, there is a website that can help you: https://howkgtolbs.com/convert/15-kg-to-lbs
Actually it works pretty well with calories counting, you will lose on weight pretty fast when u gonna eat light weighted meals