Calorie counting

Yes, you count EVERYTHING you put into your mouth.

For your salad, you measure then enter the amount of each ingredient in it into your food diary and MFP calculates the calories for you. Example: 2 cups romaine lettuce, 12 slices cucumber, one roma tomato, two scallions, 1 large hardboiled egg, 1 TBS ranch dressing, 1 TBS Balsamic vinegar. Or whatever. When you've put it all in there, you'll know (and MFP will know) how much you've eaten.

You can log the ingredients. The most important part of logging a salad is the dressing, cheese and croutons. You could get away with just logging those.

True, you can get away with just putting the high-calorie items in there, but then you don't have a very useful tool if you're trying to track the actual nutrition of what you're eating. Also, you may be eating stuff that you think is low-calorie but isn't. Your choice, obviously. Good luck!

I am keeping on target with my calorie intake, also taking into account my excercise. But how important is keeping to my fat goal, i seem to be under it by quite a lot as i have got into the habit of eating low fat versions of food when i can? Has anyone any advise

My opinion is that when you start out you have enough to do to make your calories work out each day.
Once you're on track with logging and managing how many calories you are eating, you can move on to focussing on macros (fat, carbs, protein).

You need a certain amount of fat to stay healthy, so if you are way under you might like to start trying out some higher fat versions of things like milk, yoghurt, cheese etc. But, of course, increasing fat increases calories, so then you have to juggle the calories again!

I usually plan my meals a day in advance, and enter them into my diary so I can see how the balance looks. I don't get too bothered if I'm under or over my macros, but if I have a couple of hundred calories left I'll have a look - and if I'm low on fat I might add avocado or cheese to dinner, or if I'm missing protein I'll add something to bump up that number. Or of course, I might just competely ignore the macros and add something I'm craving (hello chocolate!)

Thank you Rubybelle, finding it hard to get out of habit of choosing low fat versions of food but your suggestion of swapping things round like cheese, which i love, is helpful. I also find planning next days diary helpful and having nutrients and vitamins listed helps to focus on what i need to increase. Am new to this site but finding that logging everything is really usefull.
Thanks again

I know what you mean - I lived through the "low fat" years of the 80s and 90s and it's a hard habit to break!
Keep logging, it gets easier

talyma73 wrote: »

I am still a bit confused on the calorie counting,. When I am counting calories, how do I count the calories in salad or do I even count them? Any help would be very useful on this.

thank you

It makes me confused as well....I do try and weigh everything but it gets old real quick and with protein, like chicken with bone, it weighs more; not sure how your supposed to accurately calulate it; i get that 4 oz of protien is a normal serving size but do you weight it before or after you cook it?? with or without the bone; i try to buy boneless but the cost is more afordable when you buy bone in....I really try to look at my intake vs weight loss and need to bet more consistent with it; some days i do good, loose a lb or two but I haven found the balance yet.....I look at the logs on days where ive lost, some times im below my goal, at times ive been at my goal and dont see a big diffenence on days i dont lose. gets me very frustrated. I also like making soups but again how do you count calories in chili when you use groundbeef, your not 100% how much your getting in a serving....Im back to trying to lose a few lbs now that fall is here, really hope i can spend tghe winter months gettin my weight and health in check.

I also like making soups but again how do you count calories in chili when you use groundbeef, your not 100% how much your getting in a serving...

There are threads explaining methods of calculating a serving from a total recipe.

The easiest is to use the recipe builder, weigh the total amount - what I do is weigh the empty pot first and then weigh full pot and deduct the difference, I have marked on bottom of pot in permanent texta so I only have to weigh empty pot once.
Some people keep a list of weights of their regularly used pots for this purpose.
I record the recipe in 100g lots and then call it that many servings - eg the total weighs 3200 g
(ie 3.2kg) I would call that 32 x 100g servings
Then weigh your amount, if it weighs, say, 400g , it is 4 servings.

Some people like to do it by grams - ie in my example call it 5200 servings and your portion 400 serves

Same principle.

It isnt 100% precise - is possible some servings have more meat, veg etc than others - but given soups are mashed up total of ingredients, the difference is likely to be very minimal.