How do you log your meals when you’re a no recipe kinda mom?

HMUA123 · September 26

Hi folks, I’m new sort of to this app and I find tracking my meals I’ve cooked on a whim, really hard to log. Do you log each ingredient in the dish as a whole or do you log just what’s in your plate? For example- I made salmon filets with basmati rice and steamed veggies. I made a soya sauce based sauce with home made spicy mayo drizzled on top. Howwwwwww do I log all that? TYSM!

cmriverside · September 26

Well, I found that by logging everything I use I am able to reliably control my weight.

So...my suggestion would be to try to do that as much as you can until you get a mental picture of ACTUAL serving sizes. If you're over weight, you haven't learned that by the seat of your pants, so doesn't it make sense to figure that out?

Write it on a scrap of paper as you add it to the dish, obviously it would be best to be using a digital food scale, but do your best with measuring devices if that's all you've got.

One serving of rice is easy for me to eye-ball now that I've been doing that for a while. Same with four ounces of any given protein, like the salmon. Negligible calories in soy. The vegetables can just be logged as a cup of mixed vegetables if you aren't using butter or cheese or other toppings.

I'd suggest really getting strict about the use of toppings like a mayo-based thing. You could be using 3g or 30g and unless you know for sure that could be a problem.

Lietchi · September 26

Depending on what the food is, I'll either:
- weigh the individual raw ingredients of the dish (notepad), log/save all of that as a meal (with the total weight of the cooked dish in the title) and then weigh my own portion and log the appropriate fraction of the meal in my diary
- weigh my part beforehand: for simple/ larger items like pieces of meat/ filets of fish/... where I've determined my portion of the meat/ fish beforehand
- weigh the cooked food and log it using a cooked food entry (for example cooked rice, boiled potatoes,... - the cooked weight doesn't vary a lot according to cooking method/ duration)

Lietchi · September 26

PS: for things like sauces added to dishes, the tare function of the scale is really handy. Put sauce container on scale, tare to zero, take as much sauce as you want and then put the container back on the scale. The negative number is then logged.
Same method is handy for adding sauce/ oils/... when cooking.

SafariGalNYC · September 26

I log the ingredients. I only log what I eat in my plate. Measure your portion.

pony4us · September 26

I am also a dump and pour always from scratch cook. I lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for about two years at age 75. In the beginning I weighed common portions to get an idea of how much a 4oz portion or 1 tsp portion really looked like, but I have never been a must weigh every single item cook...and I gave my background to let you see that everyone has their own route to success. I was surprised to find that for things like butter, oil, mayo etc my personal portion was smaller than most suggested in the data base (I use real butter but don't put a tsp on bread). It is trial and error for what works for you and your busy lifestyle, adjust your portion size, see if that helps to get you to lose at a rate that makes you happy then adjust again. If you find weighing everything somethig that works for you go for it but for me I look a a general recipe for a pan sauce I make, look in the data base for calories that are close to the recipe and "close enough" works well. I'm not stressing for a splash of wine or how big my lemon is for juice.

mtaratoot · October 3

I keep old scratch paper (envelopes and such) next to my food scale along with a couple pens. I also almost always have a pen and notepad in my shirt pocket.

As I prepare (or add) ingredients, I weigh them and scribble down what I added.

For cooking oil, which is very calorie dense, I take the lid off the bottle, tare the bottle on the scale, and pour what I think is the right amount, then weigh the bottle again. The negative number is how much I used. I did GREAT this evening; I wanted eleven grams of olive oil, and I poured EXACTLY eleven grams. That's because I do it so often I get better at the estimation, but I still weigh it because... gotta measure!

Then if I made a big batch that will be for more than one meal, I can weigh the final product. I have a tare weight for most of my cookware. I put a hot pad on the scale and weigh the full pot and subtract the tare. Then I can weigh out my portion and do math to figure out what percent of the whole dish it is.

If it's something I make often, I create a recipe. Then when I weigh the whole batch, I write the number of servings in the recipe to be how much the whole batch weighed. I can set it as 100 grams per "serving" or one gram. Then I can measure out what I ate. Here's the estimation part: when I make a very similar dish in the future, I don't bother updating the recipe. I'll still try to weigh out the calorie dense parts, like oil, but I don't weigh all the celery or tomatoes. I still weigh out how much I take, but it's from the old recipe. There's clearly some error built in to this method, but for me it's close enough.

What's harder is when I eat out. I just shrug my shoulders and try to make a decent guess of what I ate. This is where most of the error in my logging comes from. Fortunately it's not all that often. I don't stress it. Today I had something from a hot bar at a grocery. I didn't even try to log the individual items; I just found an entry for "Hot Bar" and use that to get close. That's a LOT of error because the grilled cauliflower is for sure going to be less calorie dense than the mac & cheese, but... it's not an every day thing.

The main thing is do the best you can, observe the results, make sure the results match your expectations, make corrections based on your observations and STICK TO IT!

lynn_glenmont · October 6

For that particular meal, find cooked entries for the salmon, rice, and veggies (even if it's mixed veggies, you could treat things like brocolli, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, summer squash, leafy greens as a single veg so long as your concern is mainly calories -- if the mix includes more caloric things like peas, beans, carrots, winter squash, potatoes, maybe figure 3/4 of the weight is coming from those -- they're denser by weight as well as calories).

For the sauce, I wouldn't worry about logging the soya sauce (assuming it's what we call soy sauce in the U.S. -- if it's a thicker soy-based sauce you should log it), unless you're worried about sodium). Weigh the mayo-based sauce as you add it to your plate and log it as mayo.

How do you log your meals when you’re a no recipe kinda mom?

Answers

Categories