Weighing food

rodneybrookshire8391
rodneybrookshire8391 Posts: 6 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Do you weigh your meat before or after you cook it? My Dr says I should have 4-5 ounces of protein at my meals

Replies

  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,389 Member
    Weigh before you cook. Look in the database for the exact (EXACT) syntax (no additions, alterations, or whatever) from the USDA Food Data Central (in the Legacy Foods section) to help you find the correct entry in the MFP database.
  • sollyn23l2
    sollyn23l2 Posts: 1,788 Member
    rodneybrookshire8391 wrote: »
    Do you weigh your meat before or after you cook it? My Dr says I should have 4-5 ounces of protein at my meals

    Usually, when they talk about meat quantities, they're referring to uncooked (for example, a McDonald's quarter pounder was a quarter pound of beef before cooking).
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 8,686 Member
    Before cooking. Nutritional values are based on the raw product, and anyway we all cook differently.

    My idea of heaven is outside charred pork or well done steak. Those are going to be lighter because I’ve cooked more moisture out of them.

    I have weighed meats many times both before and after, and as a general rule of thumb, for my cooking style, cooked meats weigh 66% of the raw meat. (I seldom season meat til we sit down to eat because we smoke our meats often.)

    So if I forget to weight, it’s handy to know that 3 ounces of cooked bbq is 6 oz raw.
  • tomcustombuilder
    tomcustombuilder Posts: 2,248 Member
    Always raw. Many people don’t and if they eat a decent amount it screws up there tracking and short changes their protein amounts on their macro count.
  • nicsflyingcircus
    nicsflyingcircus Posts: 2,899 Member
    edited February 11
    Ideally before. However, if you are serving yourself a portion of roast, or carving off a chicken, or serving yourself say ground beef from a larger amount cooked for multiple people, you'd have to weigh after.

    Meat generally loses about 25% (off the top of my head) of its weight when cooked, so 4-5oz raw would be 3-3.75oz cooked.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,622 Member
    rodneybrookshire8391 wrote: »
    Do you weigh your meat before or after you cook it? My Dr says I should have 4-5 ounces of protein at my meals

    Weighing raw is a good plan for calorie counting purposes, for reasons others have said.

    If the issue is whether you're meeting your doctor's goal for you, it might be good to ask your doctor for a goal in protein grams rather than weight of the protein food. The protein to weight ratio is quite different, potentially, for different protein sources, and for cooked vs. raw.

    From your avatar photo, you look like you could be approaching my demographic (60s) even if not there yet. This is a link to an international expert group's recommendation for protein intake under various conditions when 60+:

    https://www.jamda.com/article/s1525-8610(13)00326-5/fulltext

    If you're not there yet, early practice can't be harmful, I think? ;)

    It's an oversimplification, but loosely their generic idea seems to be at least 25-30 grams of protein at each of 3 meals. (There are more nuanced recommendations in the linked report.)

    If you're logging on MFP, it should be easy to identify the number of protein grams in your meat whether you log it raw or cooked. A bonus of looking at it as protein grams is that you could get the protein from more than one source per meal where the sources have different calorie/weight ratios.

  • Adventurista
    Adventurista Posts: 2,131 Member
    edited February 26
    If a diet/meal plan calls for say 6 oz meat, I always weigh what is cooked and dished up onto the plate; and use the related 'cooked, roasted, broiled, as prepared' type entry.
  • lulabelle1888
    lulabelle1888 Posts: 1 Member
    That is an excellent question I would’ve never thought to ask. I’ve always weighed my food after it’s been cooked. I wonder if this has hindered any kind of progress 😞
  • Julios2k
    Julios2k Posts: 4 Member
    edited February 26
    lulabelle1888 wrote: »
    That is an excellent question I would’ve never thought to ask. I’ve always weighed my food after it’s been cooked. I wonder if this has hindered any kind of progress 😞
    Nothing wrong with weighing your food after it's cooked, just try to be consistent and adjust portions after a week or two if needed to pursue your goals.

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