Food scale and family meals
IllustriousBee
Posts: 70 Member
I just got a food scale, and my plan, since I cook meals for a few people usually, is to tare my plate then add each item. Today we had steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans, so I put the steak on first and got that weight, then I added the potatoes and subtracted the weight of the steak, and then added the green beans and subtracted the previous weight. This worked great this time, but what if I make a meal that is a bunch of stuff mixed together? I suppose since I'm the one cooking I could weigh everything that I cook and then divide it by the number of servings, but that doesn't seem very accurate since my servings aren't going to be exact. I don't want to make this super complicated. I'm just trying to get out of a slump with stalled results. I'm pretty sure my portions during dinner are to blame. Anyone have any tips to make it easier, but still accurate?
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I typically make meals and snacks that are fairly simple. Such as salads for lunch (I weigh each type of veggie/meat/cheese before I add it to my bowl. If I ever do have a casserole style meal, or meal that involves a lot of prep in the ingredients, I attempt to find something in the database that closely matches what I've made.0
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I was thinking of just finding something that fits in the database. Hopefully that works and isn't too far off. Most of what I eat is really simple to log, but sometimes dinner is just a guessing game, so I'm pretty sure if my calorie count is off, it's because of that.1
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IllustriousBee wrote: »I was thinking of just finding something that fits in the database. Hopefully that works and isn't too far off. Most of what I eat is really simple to log, but sometimes dinner is just a guessing game, so I'm pretty sure if my calorie count is off, it's because of that.
The only way to be 100% with it would be to add all the ingredients and weights, weigh the finish product, divide the calories in each ingredient by number of grams to get a weight per gram - then weigh your portion out in grams.
Frankly, I don't do that when cooking things like chili. I find something similar, guess and shrug. I'm prone to bad stuff mentally if I get too focused on minute detail and it didn't case noticeable problems for me in loss.0 -
I do all the cooking for my family (of two), and I make extensive use of the recipe builder (Foods > Recipes on desktop, or hamburger menu > Recipes, Meals, & Foods in the app). It basically does what @wunderkindking describes, adds up the caloric value of your ingredients and divides that total by the number of servings, which can be whatever you want. If you make 650g of meatloaf, say, you could say that's 650 servings, then weigh out your portion - say it's 160g - and put in your diary that you had 160 servings of meatloaf. Or you could say the recipe makes 4 servings and just weigh out the ~160g portions as you serve it up. I weigh all my ingredients as I'm preparing food (I keep a little pad of paper right next to my kitchen scale and take notes, then enter it all in the recipe builder later).4
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I don't use the recipe builder, but the Meals functionality for this.
- I choose a random future meal in my diary (just to create the meal before saving it)
- I add the individual raw ingredients to the meal
- I weigh the finished cooked dish, subtracting the weight of the pot
- I save the meal, entering the total weight in the title for future reference long with a description
- I weigh the portion I eat and divide that by the total weight of the dish
- I enter that number as my portion of the meal I created (for example 0.35) and add it to my diary
(and I delete the food entries from the future meal where I entered the ingredients of the dish)3 -
PS: the way you describe logging currently, you're weighing the cooked foods. Are you using cooked food entries in the database?
Vegetables for example will lose weight when cooked (so more calories for the same weight). So even for meals with separate components, I weigh before cooking and after cooking and my individual portion. But I use the raw food entries for logging.2 -
I use the recipe builder as @goal06082021 describes to cook for my family of seven. I usually don't pre-divide things into equal portions because my husband and kids all eat different amounts and I don't want to worry about it, so being able to just weigh whatever I take for myself is easy. At first it can be a little tricky to adjust to this way of tracking but within a couple of months most of my commonly used recipes are saved in the builder. All I have to do is adjust a few ingredients (if the weight changes, or if I use a different brand for some reason) and then get the final weight at the end to update the next time I make something.
I have a saved list of my pot, pan, and serving dish weights too, so if I forget to tare or I can't for some reason, I can easily subtract it later.
When I save them, I use a standard naming convention so I can search for them easily later. For example, my regular breakfast is baked oatmeal and I have it saved as "Breakfast: Baked Oatmeal 1g." So alphabetically, all my breakfast recipes are together, and then the 1g reminds me to log it by how many grams I eat.2 -
I would use recipies that provide calorie info. If you make a recipe that bas 4 servings, you should be able to pretty accurately put 1/4 of it on your plate and know how many calories are there.0
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This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!1
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What works even better is to tare before adding each item - no subtraction required!IllustriousBee wrote: »I just got a food scale, and my plan, since I cook meals for a few people usually, is to tare my plate then add each item. Today we had steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans, so I put the steak on first and got that weight, then I added the potatoes and subtracted the weight of the steak, and then added the green beans and subtracted the previous weight. This worked great this time,
Like others, I use the recipe builder and use weight of the cooked meal as number of servings in the recipe builder, and then the amount of grams I take as number of servings for my food diary.but what if I make a meal that is a bunch of stuff mixed together? I suppose since I'm the one cooking I could weigh everything that I cook and then divide it by the number of servings, but that doesn't seem very accurate since my servings aren't going to be exact. I don't want to make this super complicated. I'm just trying to get out of a slump with stalled results. I'm pretty sure my portions during dinner are to blame. Anyone have any tips to make it easier, but still accurate?0 -
learn how to use the recipe builder. then weigh our your portion.0
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This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!
That works for the recipe function, but not the meals function. The serving size for a "remembered meal" is always the complete meal as you originally logged it. You can edit the quantities of the individual items in the meal after you log it, but that 1 g trick really is for the recipe function, not the meal function.0 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!
That works for the recipe function, but not the meals function. The serving size for a "remembered meal" is always the complete meal as you originally logged it. You can edit the quantities of the individual items in the meal after you log it, but that 1 g trick really is for the recipe function, not the meal function.
You can log a fraction of a meal, you don't need to edit the quantity of every individual item.
It's not the same as the 1g thing though, but still based on the weight (weight of portion divided by weight of total meal to calculate the fraction of the meal).1 -
I suppose since I'm the one cooking I could weigh everything that I cook and then divide it by the number of servings, but that doesn't seem very accurate since my servings aren't going to be exact.The only way to be 100% with it would be to add all the ingredients and weights, weigh the finish product, divide the calories in each ingredient by number of grams to get a weight per gram - then weigh your portion out in grams.
No it is easier than that
You make the total using the recipe builder.
then weigh total - easiest way to do this is weigh pot empty first before you start (even easier: do this once and write weight on bottom in permanant texta for future times) , then weigh with casserole etc in it and subtract pot weight
call your number of servings 100g (or 1g if you like)
so, for example total weighs 2,500 g - I call it 25 servings of 100g.
Then weigh out your portion and log it accordingly - for example if my portion weighed 370g I would call it 3.7 servings.
you dont need to do any other dividing.
This way it does not matter if your serving size is different to other people's or you have a small leftover serve next day or whatever.
next time you make same dish, unless there are huge variations in how you do so - just log your serve directly from your recipes.1 -
paperpudding wrote: »I suppose since I'm the one cooking I could weigh everything that I cook and then divide it by the number of servings, but that doesn't seem very accurate since my servings aren't going to be exact.The only way to be 100% with it would be to add all the ingredients and weights, weigh the finish product, divide the calories in each ingredient by number of grams to get a weight per gram - then weigh your portion out in grams.
No it is easier than that
You make the total using the recipe builder.
then weigh total - easiest way to do this is weigh pot empty first before you start (even easier: do this once and write weight on bottom in permanant texta for future times) , then weigh with casserole etc in it and subtract pot weight
call your number of servings 100g (or 1g if you like)
so, for example total weighs 2,500 g - I call it 25 servings of 100g.
Then weigh out your portion and log it accordingly - for example if my portion weighed 370g I would call it 3.7 servings.
you dont need to do any other dividing.
This way it does not matter if your serving size is different to other people's or you have a small leftover serve next day or whatever.
next time you make same dish, unless there are huge variations in how you do so - just log your serve directly from your recipes.
Thanks! This is super simple, and I can just tare the baking dish or pot so I don't even have to worry about that weight.0 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!This thread has been super helpful. I've been trying to get the hang of the meals function, but I was always confused by the serving size...if I'm cooking a dish I don't know what the proper serving size is, now I see that I could just use 1g as a serving and weigh my portion. Super helpful for future reference!
That works for the recipe function, but not the meals function. The serving size for a "remembered meal" is always the complete meal as you originally logged it. You can edit the quantities of the individual items in the meal after you log it, but that 1 g trick really is for the recipe function, not the meal function.
You can log a fraction of a meal, you don't need to edit the quantity of every individual item.
It's not the same as the 1g thing though, but still based on the weight (weight of portion divided by weight of total meal to calculate the fraction of the meal).
Yes, you can. I don't understand why anyone would use the "meal" feature for that instead of the recipe feature. If you're assuming you're getting the exact same proportion of every ingredient, why not just use the recipe feature?
The benefit of the meal feature is that you can log something like a sandwich or a smoothie or your oatmeal with toppings and then delete the cheese from the sandwich because you decided to skip it, or sub a new protein powder you're trying in the smoothie, or choose from among a number of toppings you've saved in the oatmeal meal, deleting the ones you didn't use today and adjusting the quantities as needed of those you did use. But if you're assuming you're eating all the ingredients in the same percentage, I would just use the recipe feature.0 -
I rarely eat the same exact recipe. A lot of the times I'll take a previous Meal as a basis for creating a new one with perhaps the same ingredients but different proportions, or a similar list of ingredients but some different ingredients added on 0 for example.
I find it a lot more convenient than creating a new recipe from scratch or, the alternative, editing the existing recipe and losing the original. Especially since the search function in recipes is different from the general food search (no tab My Foods? No Recent foods?)
I also like seeing the individual ingredients in my diary and on top of that, it's just plain habit I guess. I've been using Meals for so long, before I knew there was a recipe builder.1 -
I'm with Leitchi, "Meals" works better for me for most things - but some sauces and dressings I make are exact recipes and I use "Recipes" for those.
Problem with Recipes is that it's tedious to change them and they're harder to search for in the recipes section - AND they don't pop up in a regular database search the way Meals do.
I far prefer the "Meals" function over the "Recipes."1
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