For those that "track and weight everything" (how ?) do you manage ?:
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.
As someone who has successfully tracked calories in the past with great effort, the trick is to be strict about measuring calorie-dense foods, but to be liberal with "lighter" foods where the calories are functionally de minimis. An ounce of olive oil has 250 kilocalories. An ounce of lean protein generally has 30-50 kilocalories. An ounce of green vegetables contains virtually no kilocalories.
As such, things like oils and miso can be heavily caloric, and need to be measured strictly. This is also true of most proteins and carbs.
Seeds and tomato sauce can have some caloric density, and should also be measured, but it is less of a priority.
Mustard, lemon juice, most spices (that don't contain sugar), onions, cucumbers (regardless of density) and parsley do not have any substantial caloric density and can be considered "free" unless used in great quantities. Nobody ever gained weight from mustard, lemons, onions, cucumbers and parsley.
As already mentioned, micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured in a home kitchen. If you're concerned about any decrease in micronutrients, simply use vitamin and mineral supplements. Macros like proteins, carbs and fats, on the other hand, can generally be measured using typical cups, spoons and scales, even with leftovers.
When making a meal shared with others if you are looking to strictly track calories, it is easier to break things into macronutrients and mix them on individual plates or bowls rather than cook as a total pot. It's much easier to measure a protein (say, 4oz chicken), a carb (say, a potato), a sauce and a fat individually portioned on a plate than an arbitrary stew. (As above, low-calorie vegetables likely do not need to be measured separately unless there are added macronutrients.)
That may sense. Most of the folks here seems to track calories and other macro. In the meantime...
> micronutrients like vitamins are not functionally possible to be measured
... my concern is micro: I'm engaging on a full vegetable diet (+shrooms +minerals!) and am concerned about thinks like iron, selenium, calcium... I (got-used-to) love vegetable and eat a lot of them so I'm probably fine with most micros, however may miss some selenium for exemple. Some research seems to show that too much vitamins is usually ok but too much minerals may not be. The more I read the more I'm scared! What makes me feel safe is the three long-time vegan I know seems healthy and don't take any supplement appart obvious B12. Perhaps I should just focus on other thinks that doing mad about micros...
Both supplementation and dietary strictness are scary because of the consistency. A quantity that is safe every day for a week or a month is not necessary safe every day for a year, and a quantity that is safe for a year is not necessarily safe for ten years. I've known two long-term vegetarians who were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia in their thirties. One of them passed out while cycling home from work, which I'm guessing meant that she was suffering in small ways for a long time before she realized it. But if she took a mineral supplement every day for twenty years, how might she find out if she was getting too much of something? They sell the same supplements to people who are 5' 100 lbs and 6'4" 250 lbs.
I mean, in regards to iron specifically, I get bloodwork done in my yearly checkup and it will tell me my iron levels.
Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.
ETA:
I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?
Counting works for people because it quantifies their food intake. For many people, that's an effective way to overcome a learned idea that portions should be huge, or that feeling hungry has to be addressed immediately, or that feeling "full" has to be constant. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend it to people with an ED history; however, after about a month or 2 of doing it, it can really change how you look at your meals, and snacking in particular. I don't obsess over it.
> - sauces you make yourself?
I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.
> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.
This is it. There will always going to be impossibly unpredictable errors even if you measure everything perfectly.
The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.
A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.
A lot of people mess up more by doing a maintenance calorie estimation wrong and relying on it rather than counting calories coupled with weighing themselves and adjusting calorie intake up/down depending on whether they lose/add weight... If you use a feedback loop, then indeed it doesn't matter if your calorie estimate is anywhere near correct anyway, as long as you're reasonably consistent and the errors aren't too badly skewed toward the wrong foods.
I did this. I targeted 0.5kg loss per week, and since 1kg of fat is 7000 kcal that meant 500 kcal deficit per week was needed.
I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.
I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.
Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.
Yep, it doesn't particularly matter if something that's actually 212 or 198 is entered as 200. Sometimes you'll be slightly over, sometimes slightly below - just try to be accurate and these small mistakes average out.
Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.
I worked on calorie counting software in the 00's. We had desktop software that just used floats, meanwhile the Palm Pilot software was all integer math (counting things in 10ths and 100ths when that precision was needed.)
We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.
This won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make it a lot easier.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
>Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.
I founded a startup based on this idea. Track purchases with credit cards and sum things up on a monthly basis. Unfortunately couldn't find a grocer to take me up on it mid pandemic, but I want to try it again in a few years if no one has made it work yet.
A jar of mayonnaise?? you can measure by the spoonful (or better, by weight, since its nutritional value is in the package) whenever you eat.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
> A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats
Over several months the errors will average out. Unless you eat out a lot, then the above method doesn't work. However if you are single (this is the most unlikely factor!) and cook most meals at home then calories in the door - what you throw away = calories that you ate. That is good enough.
I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.
Even simpler if just looking after oneself: keep the receipts, make the accounting YEARLY.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
I am very diligent, and the truth is that it is hard and it changes how you eat to be more countable. On a cut, it matters more. On maintenance, it matters less.
But most of it is a guessing game and making an assumption that it will all even out later. Ignore spices - you can assume 25 calories a day and it’ll still be too much.
Be diligent about oils. 9 calories a gram bites you quickly.
But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And that’s the key - we know nutrition is variable. You won’t get it perfect. You just have to adjust for the imperfections.
>But ultimately, if you miss 100 calories a day, and are in a 500 calorie deficit recorded, you are still going to lose .8 pounds a week. And if that is consistent, adjust your portions and be fine with how you record.
And the thing is, you'll need to do this anyway - because you can't be sure in advance how many calories represents a "500 calorie deficit" for you, in your specific current conditions.
I was quite underweight in my youth, but I successfully reversed these kinds of feedback techniques to gain weight, and currently maintain what seems to be a healthy level. John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk, who passed away early last year) wrote The Hacker's Diet describing the basic technique. It's still live at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ .
Depends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all.
Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having a nice skin tone.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.
Maximize might be a little overkill. The government recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I found that getting to that range involves putting so many vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.
Totally fair point. My guess though is most people who are getting 5-9 servings of whole fruits / vegetables per day consistently don't (or maybe shouldn't for long) have a goal of losing weight.
If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.
I use Cronometer (www.cronometer.com) and a scale. It lets you create recipes with the weight of each item and the weight of the final result. I then weigh the portion I have with a meal. Why do I do this in the first place? I'm one of those people that eats too little vs too much, especially in the summers when I'm outside all day burning tons of energy: tracking calories helps me keep weight on. I have to eat so much food to maintain my target weight that it gets pretty uncomfortable some days. Yay for muffins and cookies.
Don't worry about how leftover nutrients decrease over time: you'll get enough nutrients in a well balanced diet without having to worry about the minutia. If you're really worried about it, pop a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
Also don't worry about the variation in calories between one type of cucumber / apple / whatever vs. another. Those variations aren't significant and they probably average out anyway. Realize too that the sources aren't exact in the first place: once source is likely to give a different caloric value for something like dried beans vs another.
If you're going to track, don't get too caught up worrying about if the absolute value of the calories you're recording is 100% accurate because even if they were, you can't track your energy expenditure 100% accurately. If the bathroom scale goes in the wrong direction for you, adjust your caloric intake to compensate. Look at trends over the week and over the month vs day to day variations and it won't take long to zero in on the right number for you.
For weighing things, I have a kitchen scale that lets me tare it with something on it. I find it easier to tare a container of an ingredient, then dose some of that ingredient out, then reweigh it to get the delta I put in. For things which have a dash of an ingredient I'll just guess. A few grams here and there won't really matter much.
For partitioning a meal: Sometimes I weigh my portion. Over time I've trained myself to estimate the weight of what I take such that my visual estimates are reasonable. Eventually my visual estimates have gotten better.
A lot of your other challenges are just not that important: If you're off by a few calories in either direction, it's not a big deal. It'll average out in the long run. If you're systematically off, you'll eventually recalibrate your goals anyway based on how you feel and/or your weight patterns vs what the calorie counts tell you.
> - sauces you make yourself?… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yup, it will. Nobody said tracking nutrients was quick.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Cooking time doesn't matter for macronutrients.
> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
They don't for macronutrients.
> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
The differences don't really matter for calorie purposes. High-caloric things don't vary in density meaningfully.
You seem to be confusing tracking macronutrients (carbs, fats, protein) with micronutrients (vitamin C etc.). People track macros, generally to lose weight. I've never heard of anyone tracking micros. I don't think it's even possible.
tbh it's "easy" if you're also doing a pretty specific focused diet. (maybe simple would be a better phrase - it can be reduced to very simple steps. mentally choosing to do this and enduring it is difficult, but the process itself is straightforward.)
like the worry about sauces is true but if you eat mostly chicken and rice and one slice of bread a day you can really get that variability down. when I was heavily restricting I would only cook very simple things like that and otherwise eat packaged food, and it certainly worked to lose weight. but you sacrifice variety and flavor and you'll feel kinda stressed and hungry for months at a time.
the last factor is living with people who are not dieting - I personally think this makes the required willpower basically impossible. if there is food in the house you will eventually succumb to the temptation of eating it in my experience. it's much easier if you live alone and only have the diet food in the house at all, buying nothing else, etc.
One insidious thing is that it's incredibly easy to do food tracking if you eat mostly single-serving prepared foods, but those are, by nature of being incredibly palatable and digestible, the most psychologically and metabolically challenging foods to maintain a calorie deficit with.
yeah, although there's a variety there and you can find some lower and higher ones. (bags of anything starchy are difficult, sandwiches are very variable.. I leaned on wraps and stuff like Chicken salad without toppings a lot.)
some prepared foods are basically the "empty calories" that people always talk about, like chips. high calorie (and usually like 3-4 servings per bag, not single serving really at all) and also low satiation so they almost make you hungrier to eat.
I get what you're saying, but I'm referring strictly to the task of nutrient tracking. I'm doing it right now while _not_ trying to lose weight (or gain it, or necessarily stay the same weight) and it's a big game of eyeballing stuff where it's incredibly hard to get it right
I don't, but what I did do was track everything obsessively in a spreadsheet for about a week, while exercising and eating and sleeping a nominally correct amount. As you indicate, it's a lot of manual effort to track everything like that, and I couldn't see myself doing it long term.
But over that week, I "calibrated" myself. I know, vibe-wise, how it feels to be eating the correct amount of food. And now I just keep doing that.
It depends why you're tracking things, and what level of "everything" you care about.
Starting with pretty much everything can be a good idea for people to get a sense of what's in what foods. How much does an onion typically weigh? What's that actually adding? What's the difference between getting lean and fattier meat? How much oil are you really adding?
After that it's easier to start dropping things - if I'm trying to lose weight I simply do not care precisely how much celery I've added for the sofrito. I do care about the amount of butter, oil, rice, bread, pasta though.
I'm not concerned about getting fat adding paprika, so I'm not weighing spices. Even if I'm trying to track macros that's just not going to be a considerable contributor to anything.
> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
Prep/measure things first.
Last three things that smooth things over for me
1. Meal prep on a different day. I'm not in as much of a rush at night, it's proportionally less time involved measuring something for a larger number of meals/sauces/components.
2. Having measuring spoons and fast scales nearby.
3. Measuring before & after amounts rather than exactly what to add. If I need to add butter to a sauce until it's the right consistency, or flour to a dough, or whatever then weighing as I go is a nightmare. Instead just weigh it before and after and you'll see what you used. This tip works pretty well for oil too.
I don’t do this anymore, but when I was, the answers are as follows:
I didn’t make a ton of sauces myself, but if it was then I would round spices down to zero and weigh the main caloric components (think mayo, soy sauce, sugar, oil, tomato paste, etc)
I always weighed the uncooked food, so different cooking times was a non factor.
As for nutrients decreasing, I dealt with this by not believing in it. Seriously though, I was tracking fats, carbs, and proteins which to my knowledge do not meaningfully decay in non negligible amounts.
I lived alone so I didn’t often have to cook for multiple people. When I did I would just make 2 omelets or waffles or whatever and weigh mine.
As far as different species/cultivation methods, I realized there was an absolute edge to my ability to track. For example: bread is often listed at 70 calories per slice, but if you weigh each slice, you’ll find it deviates from what the package considers a “slice” of bread substantially. Further, you’ll often find packages that are inconsistent. For example, you might see a box that claims 14g of a food is 5 calories but the entire 28g container is also listed at 15 calories.
In what you listed under making a sauce, only mayo and the oils need to be weighed (unless it's some ridiculous amount of seeds). If you don't already know whats high calorie you learn quickly, in reality the average person gets the bulk of their calories from probably less than 10 items (flour/rice/chicken/etc).
It's less important to get the calorie numbers perfect, and more important to be consistent in your under/over reporting. To me, it's a tool to track the consistency of my diet. No amount of over/under reporting is hiding 2 slices of pizza on a graph.
In sweet dishes, 2 TBSP sugar is 120 calories. In savory dishes, 1 TBSP oil is 100 calories. None of the other minor ingredients have any appreciable calories. You should be able to predict quantities within a 1 TBSP tolerance range. The rest of your calories come from foods with visible volume, and chatgpt does a good job of predicting their calories from screenshots. With that, hopefully, you don't under-report any meal by more than 200 calories. If you're following a recipe, dump the whole thing into chatgpt, voila.
Over 2 meals, under-reporting by 200 calories feels like a lot. But wait to have 1 milkshake, beer or 1 tiny baklava and see the graph shoot beyond any of these pesky concerns. The goal is to track and be accountable for the latter: the ultra-palatable foods. The extra onions and parsley are not making you fat.
For outside food, you can find official numbers reported by fast food places. Add 20% to their estimate. Actually, add 10% to all estimates. Every your own food. If a full meal randomly lands under 500 calories. I look at it with scrutiny. It takes careful effort to stay under 500 and feel full. If it happens consistently and you don't lose weight, then you're tracking something wrong.
PSA: NUTS HAVE A SH*T TON OF CALORIES. ALWAYS REPORT THEM. YOU WILL BE SHOCKED.
_____
The system has worked quite well for me.
In all cases, my weight gain has corresponded to long periods of door dashing, liquid calories & dessert binges. On these days, my daily calorie consumption jumps by ~800 calories. Getting your oil intake wrong by 1 TBSP makes no difference to that number. Focus on the main culprits.
____
P.S: ofc, if you care about micros, my comment is irrelevant.
I suppose it depends what goals you're pursuing with your tracking. If it's simply losing weight, you can focus on the things with lots of calories in them. Oil, sugar, processed foods. Tomatoes, cucumber and lemon juice shouldn't be an issue.
I bought myself a food weight to have at the kitchen but just like you I struggled with all the minor things that gets added in rapid succession. The trick is to get good enough at estimating within reason, and focus on one aspect such as calories.
Figure out what one table spoon of oil contains, and when you make a sauce use a table spoon while pouring to count roughly how much oil you are putting in.
For shared meals, or self-restricted portions, I just add the entire meal upfront to my book-keeping, and then after are are done eating I subtract what I didn't eat.
You don't need to keep track of the family history of your cucumbers.
I'm not tracking right now, but used to. So I can answer your question with the caveat that yes it is a pain and I stopped doing it. :)
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
Yes. The thing is that it also makes you aware of how much everything "costs" you in terms of calories. You become a lot more aware of how big a glug you give of that oil.
> different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
I don't understand this part of your question.
> Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
My goal was not to be "accurate", but to lose weight. Overestimating slightly was in fact preferred. So this is not an effect I would have worried about.
> counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
You estimate. You know that the whole thing was X so if you eat a quarter of it that is 0.25*X.
> different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
Cucumber is flavoured water. Whatever is the variability in calories you can probably just ignore it.
I've only done this on occasion when cooking for my spouse when she was counting.
The measuring of ingredients is much easier if you use a scale. A case like cold sauces where you can put the mixing vessel on the scale is the easiest case.
On sharing with others: I'd always calculate the total calories and total weight of the entire dish and then simply place the serving plate on the scale and calculate the taken calories based on the weight.
It's really just focused on a keto diet, but using the app at https://www.carbmanager.com you can look up low-carb foods really well and enter units in all kinds of ways. I know someone who successfully used it for about 2 months a while ago, but then they went off keto and the app DB didn't have many non-carb heavy foods.
For me I mostly just try to log the high macro and/or calorie items. Like if I make a Caesar dressing I’m mostly counting the oil and if I’m being really meticulous I’ll measure the Parmesan and anchovy content. But I’ll ignore the 2tbsp lemon juice, garlic, mustard, etc. since it’s counting so little towards the totals I care about.
If you’re trying to measure your vitamin intake this may not work for you, though.
For vitamins are probably easier to start in the other end and have a blood test to check how you're doing. I have no idea if that would involve selling your first born in the US though
Many are water soluble and so any excess in the body is peed out by the end of the day and so all tests are useless. Fortunately you typically get more than enough as part of a typical balanced diet and so you shouldn't need to supplement in the first place if you are eating well. Though it is almost impossible to overdose so if it makes you feel good there is no harm in making the vitamin companies rich.
The rest you can get blood tests. In general it isn't worth testing unless your doctor suspects something is wrong though. Just eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise and you will mostly be fine. Maybe take some vitamin D in winter, but ask your doctor (my doctor told me vitamin d in winter so that is what I do)
> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.
Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.
I live by myself and "charge" calories to an account whenever I buy raw foods at the store or eat out. Then, whatever is in my house, I have already "accounted" for in my caloric budget. The strategy comes in figuring out what foods / combinations of foods leave me feeling satisfied. Beans (another great living-alone food, haha) are an allstar. I weigh ingredients for a lot of cooking only so I pace the consumption of rice, beans, etc.
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
Eventually you learn recipes and their values. I memorised a lot of basics. But mostly I cut out non-vegetable carbohydrates and ate a ton of salads with nonfat Greek yogurt and hot sauce as a dressing, and whey protein.
What I did is just get a rough estimate of calories of things I'm eating. Along with tracking weight every day. Then over a couple of weeks, calibrated calorie estimates with recorded weight changes. Developed an intuition.
After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).
Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.
You're never going to be 100% precise for every day, but you should be able to be roughly correct in aggregate and the fact of recording what you eat makes you more conscious of what you put in your mouth.
90%+ of the effort is just weighing everything and writing it down. If you make a lot of custom dishes that's fine - just save the recipe and measure out the ingredients consistently. Weigh out your portions and it's not a big deal...
People who are tracking everything are usually doing it because they're trying to achieve a particular goal that involves cutting or bulking. I don't know too many people who do rigorous calorie tracking to achieve maintenance unless their body is their profession.
Macros are pretty stable though. A week old veggie has less vitamins than a fresh one, but the carbs are pretty unchanged. Trying to measure and weigh for micro nutrients seems doomed though.
As a way of life, weighing and counting macros also seems pretty doomed to because it's just so much work, but it's very doable for a few days to realign your view of what an appropriate amount of food is, if you're diligent and mindful enough to not have a soda or a snack without thinking
Getting the grams right goes a long way. At the end of the day, you're trying to approximately measure the caloric density per gram, and maybe macros (proportion protein / fat / carbs). You're thinking in way too fine detail for it to be sustainable. Even with a lax approach, it is pretty tedious.
I wouldn't really recommend tracking long-term, but doing it for a week or so just to get a sense of how much you're currently consuming is a good idea.
This probably doesn't count, but I pretty much eat the same thing every day. I think being pretty far along the autistic spectrum makes this easier for me than most.
I would imagine that having a camera videoing your preparation of ingredients and cooking would give enough data to classify the ingredients and the used volumes. From the video it should be easier to track the weight of everything... and perhaps depending on how the ingredients are used, determine/predict how the macronutrients are altered during the process.
Well, caloric value isn't that exact to begin with, so there is no point in being overly exact. Afaik it's derived by burning the food and measuring the heat it produces, but your body doesn't burn it (like pyrolysis), it uses specialized proteins. So the energy conversion varies, some can't be digested at all.
I would look at nutrition labels for ingredients, estimate how much I used and approximate calories. For prepared foods, I'd look at other common examples with known quantities on the internet and extrapolate.
On the first point, you only need to do it once and then you can reuse the information in future (assuming you stick to the same recipe).
For the other points, I think with any kind of data measurement there is a balance between precision and convenience. Trying to consistently track calories is hard enough, trying to track nutrients at the level of precision you are suggesting sounds technically challenging and frankly exhausting. I think a lot of people will take "average" values for a cucumber, an onion, etc. Like others have said, consistency in measurement is probably more important than finding the absolute truth.
For sauces, I either use a bottled sauce if I really want to stick to macros, or I try to make the exact same recipe each time and then I can select my previously created logged item in the diet app.
That's really key. I've had great success with calorie tracking, but the first few weeks always sucks until I have my regulars figured out, then it becomes a lot easier. Afterwards, it's just a matter of repetition and measuring.
For things I prepare in bulk myself (eg perhaps sauce in your case), I usually just get stats on the whole batch. Then just approximate per serving or average it over the whole batch.
I use myfitnesspal and try to get close. There is a lot of data in the database. It is a tool like anything else it just helps me eat more intentionally.
I just measure the ingredients "roughly" and same with serving I try to eye-ball halving or quartering etc and don't worry too much about being super precise. 5g is enough precision for me, unless it is something like cheese or other high-fat things. And I don't count vegetables at all (apart from potato)
Some days you'll go over, others go under etc.
It helps a lot of your partner is also weighing etc
Where it is really hard though is at a BigCo office where food is free and self-served. I have no idea what I am loading onto my plate - I try to search for something similar in the app and deliberately over-estimate the quantity knowing that there is a tendency to under estimate.
Really though weighing things is almost beside the point. It's about being aware/mindful of what you are eating. Without tracking it, it is easy to absent mindedly just snack on things and then entirely forget about that brownie you had with your morning coffee, or that ice cream you had at lunch time. You start to make choices like "Hmm I wont have that chocolate now because it would be a disappointment not to have some for dessert at dinner time" etc, whereas without tracking you'd probably just eat everything and not even realise/remember/be-aware of it.
adjusting seasoning/tasting as you go seems like it would complicate matters too, especially if you're in the heat of it and don't have time to stop and weigh that extra pinch of salt etc
Spices and everything else in general have so little in them it doesn't matter. Something like seeds or pepper more so, but you're hardly going to add so many it changes anything.
Which is kind of the point: you look this stuff up once in order to get a sense of what you're actually doing, and quickly realize what is and isn't going to matter overall. If you're really concerned, you start from a fixed mass you'll season from, and then just use that up as you go.
i.e. if you know you'll be adjusting added sugar, then estimate the total amount of sugar you're comfortable putting in the meal up front, and work from that pool. If it's less, great.
I mean I eat very close to the same thing every day, so I am perhaps not the best example, but for example:
> - sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
You weigh all this out once, store it as a recipe and just weigh how much sauce you're putting on things. Oils are so high calorie they're basically all the same, and the only other contributor is really if the seed mass is substantial. Log your upper end, and just assume the sauce comes out as that value. Your sauce recipe is hardly going to vary by an enormous amount, just provided you bias it towards the upper end for the purposes of tracking.
EDIT: Also since people have been dropping app links - https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline this is what I use on Android. Libre with nice integrations, works great.
Well, by weighing and logging everything. You are correct that it takes a lot longer when you do that. That's the cost of keeping track of your caloric intake. I also do not account for any nutrient loss or divergence from different cooking times, leftovers, or from different species.
I only weigh everything I eat when I am actively trying to lose weight, however, and when I am doing so I deliberately restrict my diet to meals where I won't waste a lot of time weighing everything. If I'm trying to maintain or gain weight, I don't really bother with it.
I have been obese for many years and also now if I do not pay attention to what I eat I gain weight immediately.
Eventually I have learned to control exactly what I eat, in order to control my weight, but I no longer find this difficult, mainly because normally I eat only what I cook myself (with the exception of trips away from home).
When I experiment how to cook something that I have never cooked before, after I reach a stable recipe with which I am content, I measure carefully every ingredient, either with digital kitchen scales or with a set of volumetric spoons. Then I compute the relevant nutrient content, e.g. calories, protein content, fatty acid profile, possibly some vitamin and mineral content, in the cases when there exists a significant content of that.
While I do this carefully the first time and I record the results, whenever I cook the same later I do not need to pay attention to this, because I already know the nutrient content, so summing for all the portions of food that I plan to eat in that day I can easily estimate the daily intake for everything.
The essential change in my habits that enabled me to lose the excessive weight was that in the past I was eating without paying attention to quantity, until I was satiated, while now I always plan what amount of food I will eat during a day and I always cook the food in portions of the size that I intend to eat, which is always the same for a given kind of food, so I no longer have to repeat any of the computations that I have made when I have determined for the first time a recipe.
In a recipe, things like spices can be ignored, because they add negligible nutrients. Even many vegetable parts, like leaves or stalks, or even some of the roots or of the non-sweet non-fatty fruits, may be ignored even when used in relatively great quantities, because their nutrient content is low. So such ingredients may be added while cooking without measuring them.
For many vegetables and fruits, which are added to food as a number of pieces, I do not measure them when cooking, but when buying. I typically buy an amount sufficient for next week, which is weighed during buying. Then I add every day a n approximate fraction of what I have bought, e.g. 1/7 if used for cooking every day. Then for estimating the average daily intake, I divide by 7 what I have bought for the week.
What cannot be ignored and must always be measured during cooking, to be sure that you add the right amount, are any kinds of seeds or nuts or meat or dairy or eggs, anything containing non-negligible amounts of starch or sugar, any kind of fat or oil or protein extracts. Any such ingredients must always be measured by weight or by volume, to be sure that you add the right amount to food.
Nevertheless, measuring the important ingredients adds negligible time to cooking and ensures perfectly reproducible results.
I eat only what I cook myself and I measure carefully everything that matters, but the total time spent daily with measurements is extremely small. I doubt that summing all the times spent with measuring food ingredients during a whole day can give a total of more than one minute or two. Paring and peeling vegetables or washing dishes takes much more time.
I've done that for weight loss, so I focussed on calories only. That was pretty easy:
- while cooking, you weigh every ingredient. Either I just take photos of the scale with my phone, or I write it on a sheet of paper.
- when cooking is done, you weigh the total food (easiest if you know the weight of your pots)
- when eating, you weigh your portions
After some time, you realise that you need to be precise for some things (oil, butter) but can just guess or ignore some things (eg. onions and miso have so little calories that you really don't need to weigh them).
If it's a dish like Lasagna, you don't even need to weigh it at the end, just estimate what fraction of the dish your serving is.
Exactly this. You just weigh every ingredient. It doesn't matter if it's a sauce or what. If it's something premade (like tomato sauce) you use the calories on the packaging. If it's a raw ingredient you look it up.
I never bothered with weighing the final result or portions, instead I just always divvied up the final product into equal individual portions and divided by the total number of portions. That works well if you freeze them.
Of course, all the calculation is a tremendous amount of work. I did it when I needed to lose weight and only did it for a couple of months. But it definitely "calibrated" my understanding of calories -- e.g. non-starchy veggies have barely any at all, while cheese and butter and oil can easily double the calories in a dish.
Keep in mind that I calculate enough to achieve caloric deficit. Not to reach an exact number.
I also leave the nutrient part on just eating a varied diet, with lots of whole foods.
I personally use MyFitnessPal, weigh the calorie significant food (e.g. the Protein, starches, fat-rich vegetables and fatty sauces) and establish a rough estimate about the calories.
I try to maintain the error an order of magnitude lower than my estimate. That's why I don't bother weighing leafy and "watery" vegetables (e.g. spinach, letucce or cucurbits).
Also, I try to keep an eye of sauces like Mayonnaise, but I usually relax on Mustard (I dunno where you live, but mustard here tends to be low-fat by default).
That error can be easily burnt by the casual movement we do in the day.
Some foods I know, eg. oil 9kcal/g, but mostly I just check the label. Every food in the EU has the calories/100g or calories/100ml on the label. If it's not packaged, I look it up it FDDB [1].
Tracking and weighing everything is a massive waste of time and energy. There are no obese animals (humans included) in the wild. Just stop eating the wrong things.
I maintain a muscular 225 by eating dairy, eggs, and meat. If I want to drop down to 215, I drop dairy.
Not him but because your answer surprised me I chose to reply: at 34 it is also something I always wondered.
Becoming obese always seemed a little extreme to me and I fail to imagine how someone could reach that state without the accordingly extreme food-related habits - though maybe I'm just lucky to have the "right" metabolism and thus cannot relate.
Though even if obesity was always linked to eating disorders, I understand that "just stop" is not an appropriate response to that issue.
- sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself
- different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)
- Leftovers nutrients decrease with time
- counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time
- different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January
I have the feeling that might have been easy at some point in my life when I lived alone and mostly eat packaged food and raw vegetable that looked like clones but not when I share my meal, cook a lot more raw un-barcoded aliments and gained confidence to dose "by the eye" without recipes.