Noob Question - Weights and Measures

[OrderInChaos]

In the effort to track meals more accurately, I've noticed an odd discrepancy and wonder if folks can clarify here. Additionally, any sweet haxxx for how to prepare in advance and still accurately track food are welcome no matter how broad and general.

My specific question that motivated this post, though, is in regards to measurement as cups versus grams and how widely figures can vary. An easy example in relation to my common carb foods follows:

My oats package lists "1/2 Cup (40g) uncooked", which contains 150 calories and 27g of Carbs. My jasmine rice lists "1/4 Cup (45g)", which contains 158 calories and 35g of carbs. It doesn't make sense that the oats are "twice as many cups" when by weight via grams they're practically the same and mostly at parity of caloric content.

I've used grams in all my tracking and more or less trust that my scale "gets it right", and is at least very precise and consistent if not accurate based on how much a given measuring implement weighs out to. Maybe a quantity reading "50g" is actually 40g, or 75g, but it's consistent so that won't crush my results as long as I pay attention and adjust accordingly.

Regarding the cups idiocy; should I just forget cups and stick with grams for tracking?

Bonus round questions:

• Is it better to weigh rice/oats/grains before cooking?
• Weigh meats cooked or raw? Would finding an MFP entry for "x raw, uncooked, 16oz" and going from there be most accurate?
• Are fibrous veggies worth tracking or just better to write "some broccoli crowns", and get on with it?
• Convenient ways to measure oils/fats? ->Is a single Tbsp implement best for cooked dishes, and measuring by weight on a tared scale best for raw (oil on a salad, etc.)?

Thanks!

[TimK]

Honestly I don’t think it matters much how/when you measure stuff as long as you’re consistent. It’s not important to be super accurate because you still need to track your results and adjust accordingly. If you’re consistently over or under estimating calories you will correct for that pretty quickly.

[omaniphil]

I think the issue is that a cup is a unit of volume, while a grams is a unit of mass, and so the measurement from one food to the next isnot the same as the density of food changes. So, since oats are less dense, a 1/2 cup of them may weigh 40g, but with rice, 40gr is somewhat less than a 1/4 cup.

[mouse]

I think the issue is that a cup is a unit of volume, while a grams is a unit of mass, and so the measurement from one food to the next isnot the same as the density of food changes. So, since oats are less dense, a 1/2 cup of them may weigh 40g, but with rice, 40gr is somewhat less than a 1/4 cup.

Bingo.

Also, weigh meat cooked and don't bother tracking the fibrous veggies...

I never tracked cooking oils, namely because I don't use them much (I grill most of my meat year round).

Caveat, I don't track anymore, I just eat and adjust on the fly as necessary, it's been working fine as far as I can tell...

[nkupianist]

Regarding the cups idiocy; should I just forget cups and stick with grams for tracking?

I'd definitely vote in favor of using your food scale for everything. If nothing else, adding ingredients to a prepped meal or recipe saves a lot of measuring cup cleaning.

Is it better to weigh rice/oats/grains before cooking? [*]Weigh meats cooked or raw? Would finding an MFP entry for "x raw, uncooked, 16oz" and going from there be most accurate?

Definitely. Whenever possible, I track cooked weight. Eventually, it just becomes a habit when cooking to put the plate you're putting your cooked meat onto on the scale before putting the food on the plate. Depending on the meat and how long you cook it, it's surprising how much mass proteins lose during cooking. Something like chicken that has to be cooked to a higher doneness loses quite a bit of weight during cooking.

Same thing goes for rice/other things that change volume during cooking. I use Loseit, and there are quite a few "Loseit verified" entries for cooked rice and such - I rarely can't find a reliable entry.

Are fibrous veggies worth tracking or just better to write "some broccoli crowns", and get on with it?

There's no right/wrong answer here, but since it takes no time to throw veggies onto a plate that's already sitting on a food scale that I used for the protein/carbs in a meal, I still weight them out. Since you're probably doing this already for a lot of other ingredients in your meals, I say why not here too?

Convenient ways to measure oils/fats? ->Is a single Tbsp implement best for cooked dishes, and measuring by weight on a tared scale best for raw (oil on a salad, etc.)?[/list]

That makes sense to me. Re: cooking, It's hard to be super strict when frying something in oil, though - how much of the oil stayed in the hot pan and how much was absorbed? I just ballpark that. Unless you're going crazy with oil/deep frying, as long as you're being consistent with how you measure as pointed out earlier and the measures are self-consistent, this probably isn't an item to stress about.

[mouse]

Look at powders or peanut butter for that, you will get a different amount every single time.

A "tablespoon" of peanut butter is however much peanut butter I can fit on the spoon... regardless of spoon size, and it changes nothing calorically...

Fight me.

[OrderInChaos]

I think the issue is that a cup is a unit of volume, while a grams is a unit of mass, and so the measurement from one food to the next isnot the same as the density of food changes. So, since oats are less dense, a 1/2 cup of them may weigh 40g, but with rice, 40gr is somewhat less than a 1/4 cup.

Bingo.

Also, weigh meat cooked and don't bother tracking the fibrous veggies...

I never tracked cooking oils, namely because I don't use them much (I grill most of my meat year round).

Caveat, I don't track anymore, I just eat and adjust on the fly as necessary, it's been working fine as far as I can tell...

1) I'm a damned idiot and don't deserve the mantle of adult human. Or at least need a physics refresher for my dumb ass.
2) Meat cooked, noted! I had that backwards thinking water loss was hard to estimate.
3) I look damned forward to being disciplined and routine enough to forego tracking until I'm failing to meet goal; for right now, being a really austere dick is the name of the game!

Thanks to you both for the clarifications

[OrderInChaos]

@Nikipedia @nkupianist @TimK
Thank you for the guidance; I'll probably end up tracking it all for the next couple weeks for a kick start in my tracking discipline, will inevitably fall off the wagon a little bit letting the veggies/et al go by the wayside first, and hope I can sustain a decent, slow cut down to ~235 before I intentionally plateau for a while.

This has always been the hardest part of training for me and I spent years thinking I could high-volume LISS my way out of a bad diet... 26 year old sedentary-office job me says otherwise!

[mouse]

@OrderInChaos I tracked for a loooonnnnng time because when I started training I was concerned about "getting fat again" lol. I didn't really stop tracking until a few months ago and after I had comfortably gained about 20-25lbs...

I just got much more comfy with my normal fluctuations, I hover somewhere between 235-240 on most days. It's definately more routine than discipline lol. I have a weakness for Snickers lately...

[SJB]

Hmmm snickers.

[Marenghi]

Differing opinion on one point: If you have references for uncooked food - take uncooked. More precise: you can grill a meat to death or you can sous vide it, so cooked weight differs greatly, although its only water that got lost. Also, the package ingredient values are meant for raw mostly if not stated otherwise.

[BenM]

Hmmm snickers.

I had a Snickers protein bar the other night. Damn good. The Mars one I had last night was probably better though.

Differing opinion on one point: If you have references for uncooked food - take uncooked. More precise: you can grill a meat to death or you can sous vide it, so cooked weight differs greatly, although its only water that got lost. Also, the package ingredient values are meant for raw mostly if not stated otherwise.

I agree with this. I weigh and track all my meat (and veges, for that matter) uncooked wherever possible. Same with rice, grains, etc.

I do track fibrous veges as well, and weigh them, but I am OCD and even weigh my spinach and rocket, although I tend to be less pedantic about being
accurate with this sort of stuff because the variations will be so much less than the margin of error overall that it's not such a big deal.

Oils and fats can be a bit of a difficult one. I don't tend to use much oil out of a bottle, but if I did I would track the same way as I track most small quantities of liquids - bottle on the tared scale, pour out the portion, bottle back on the scale, and the negative number is the quantity. But it's not worth getting _that_ pedantic about it unless it's something a bit calorie dense. For example I use spray on canola oil for cooking in a pan, or spray on olive oil for spraying on baked veges etc - I have measured these before and most of the time I am not using enough to even register a gram on the scales, so I don't bother tracking that particularly if say I'm cooking meat which already has a fat component baked into the entry in MFP. I tend to use fat free salad dressings (usually balsamic), or things like mustard which only contain a small amount of carbs, and I can usually guesstimate pretty closely what 10ml or so is and don't bother weighing.

OTOH if I am making pizza for the family and myself and adding cheese, or something else with a fairly high fat component, then I'll weigh that every time if I can.

[TimK]

Differing opinion on one point: If you have references for uncooked food - take uncooked. More precise: you can grill a meat to death or you can sous vide it, so cooked weight differs greatly, although its only water that got lost. Also, the package ingredient values are meant for raw mostly if not stated otherwise.

My thing is, weighing it raw is a PITA if you're cooking more than a single serving at once. I will cook 5lbs of chicken breast and put it in the refrigerator and eat it all week. It's much easier to weigh the portion that I'm going to eat with my meal as I'm making the meal. If I weigh a breast and it's 10oz I can easily cut some off to get the 7oz that I want (or whatever). Yeah, it might not be accurate but it's consistent and convenient and if I'm tracking bodyweight and adjusting calories accordingly it won't really matter. Granted, this has been my experience in going from fat to not-that-fat. If you're trying to get stage lean then maybe you do need to sweat those details more.

[Cinic]

One thing that always annoyed me while tracking was how the serving size by weight didn't always align with the accompanying by volume measurement. There's a multigrain cereal at TJs that says something like 'serving size 1/2 cup (40 grams)'. But 1/2 cup weighs closer to 60 grams when I throw it on the scale. I usually end up trusting the weight.

[broseph]

One thing that always annoyed me while tracking was how the serving size by weight didn't always align with the accompanying by volume measurement. There's a multigrain cereal at TJs that says something like 'serving size 1/2 cup (40 grams)'. But 1/2 cup weighs closer to 60 grams when I throw it on the scale. I usually end up trusting the weight.

This is the most annoying thing.

I go by weight for almost almost everything because of it.

[Marenghi]

@TimK

Im fine with this. Just wanted to remark that weighing things uncooked is not inferior to weighing things cooked (indeed its even a bit more precise, but practically probably doesnt matter as you said for most people), and often easier to get numbers for because its the method given on the package. Shouldve worded my post more in that vein.

[broseph]

I always figure there is some fat lost when cooking meat, so I use cooked weight for that.

When looking up values, the items listed like this: “beef, sirloin, lean portion only, cooked, broiled” are from the USDA food database and should? be pretty consistent.