Hi! I have tried to use the app my fitness pal to track what I eat , but I cook all my food so is difficult to know how much I put on something I cook. Any ideas?
How do you track your macros when you cook all your food?
Shinita
#2
It’s usually easy with cooked food as you can measure how much you use… It’s impossible with restaurant food or home-cooked by someone else…
But sometimes it’s impossible with the food I cook, sure. I have no idea about the fat content of my meat, for example. I guess based on the cut but it’s not accurate. And if I only eat certain parts of something, that’s mysterious too.
What’s your problem, exactly? I just measure everything and count.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#3
The only macro you really need to measure, if you are going to measure, is your carbohydrate intake. It is easy to weigh out your carbohydrates before cooking, and any incidental carbohydrate in meat can be ignored.
If you eat a product with a nutrition label, you can get the carb amount from the nutrition panel, but you have to be honest about your portion size. Most people find that they manufacturer’s idea of a serving is unrealistically small. So if the listed serving size is 20 g, but you eat 60 g, then you simply triple the listed amount of carbohydrate per serving and add it to your list for the day.
I use chronometer for tracking. If you add the recipe into the app, and then divide it into servings, you may get a good estimate. But accuracy is impossible, I think. I’ve done this with some recipes.
lfod14
#5
MFP is a piece of crap, seriously, it takes a very simple process and makes it a nightmare. Use Cronometer, I’m just shy of being a shill for them, but that’s because it’s awesome. For a handful of years now I’ve run at least one month of the paid versions of MFP, Cronometer and Carb Manager, the free version of Cronometer still destroys the PAID versions of the other two.
That said, you just gotta measure, as long as you get stuff pretty close it’s fine. just gotta weigh and measure, after you track a while you’ll be amazed how calibrated your eyes and hands become, but until then gotta measure and weigh. Really doesn’t add much time at all once you get used to it, especially if it’s a recipe, since you can import those directly in and then just weight what you put on your plate.
Other cool thing is you can graph everything to compare basically anything to anything, so you get to see how different tweaks effect you. That’s how I found out I was eating way too much fat to lose when I graphed it against my body weight and saw in near perfectly locked together.
lfod14
#6
Gotta add Cronometer to your dictionary 
I let my spell check do that to me about a billion times before I clicked add for some reason…
Shortstuff
(Allie)
#8
Weigh and measure everything, it’s the only way to track if you want to do it. Time consuming and generally just a pain, not to mention unnecessary.
I tracked for years meticulously, stopped years back. Currently in a tracking phase just out of curiosity more than anything, and to make sure I’m eating enough to build muscle, but really don’t need to.
What do you hope to gain from tracking?
Iskandar
#9
Been tracking macros/cals for over a decade. I use fitday classic and create my own custom food profiles for most things. I source the internet for the most accurate representation of what it is I am eating and make a profile for it.
I weigh everything raw before I cook.
Example:
100% accuracy is not the goal just close to it as I can be.
Shinita
#10
Thwere is no such thing as 100% accuracy of course. But I am sure I easily can be off quite a few hundreds of kcal if I eat fatty meat… Or if I have no idea how much fat is lost. Or what my bowl contains even if I measured everything but I don’t eat an average part…
I tend to eat the fattier parts of my pork (my SO prefers the leaner ones) and I don’t know the fat content to begin with… It’s not such a problem as I don’t know my energy need anyway. If I eat similarly every week, I may figure out what amount is good, not like it has much control over my consumption. I still like to guesstimate, it still may help to see what food items work better.
It doesn’t happen to everyone, sadly. After several years, I am still just as clueless as ever. I just can’t guess my intake with a 500 kcal accuracy, not even when I use my usual items. My tracking can do this accuracy, I think, sometimes even better.
My eyeballing of certain items are better than my kitchen scale but it doesn’t work with meat or bigger amounts let alone with all the stuff I manage to consume on a single day… OMAD helps as I have a smallish range there - but I better track to see if I need to eat more to avoid late eating later. Maybe I will find a sweet spot naturally, without tracking one day, it would be nice. Good timing and good food choices may do the trick.
Camellia
#11
As others have said, if you want to track accurately you must weigh and measure everything. And even then there is some room for error, depending on which app you’re using. However I think it’s the discipline of it which is probably more helpful, for a time, even if you’re consistently out by 100+cals or so. I bought a kitchen scale, measuring cup and spoon set and recorded quantities in a notebook while cooking (as I rarely use recipes) then put it all in the app later on. It does get quicker but is still pretty tedious. The motivation to stick with it depends on your WHY.
You can do keto very effectively while not bothering with all this, and keeping a running estimate of daily carbs in your head. Personally I found formal tracking kept me stuck in a diet mentality. But it was useful as an educational tool to start with.
Elliot-W
(Carnivore for the win)
#12
I did everything by weight, down to the gram, when eating keto and tracking. It is very effective and accurate using MyFitnessPal. You can save recipes, and regular ingredients pop up, so the more you enter ingredients, the faster tracking becomes. I bought the Amazon basics kitchen scale four years ago and it still works great.
csmith
(Clint)
#15
Yeah, I’ve found it virtually impossible to be exact. However it does get easier if you stick to whole foods. The nutrition content of, say, raw broccoli or eggs are pretty well known. Of course meats can be tough as you have no clue of the fat content, with the exception of ground beef maybe, but you can rest assured that the carbs are zero in meat, and that’s the important macro, after all. But I guess that depends on cooking your own meals. If someone else cooked it, or you’re at a restaurant? Well there’s no way to know the macros, so just try to get as close as possible. Obviously if you’re at a restaurant, steak and steamed broccoli is going to be closer to your macros than lasagna, but the reality is, you have no idea if they used some sugar in a dry rub on that steak, for instance.
brownfat
(Todd Allen)
#19
Nope. Meat has carbohydrate mostly in the form of glycogen which is commonly about 1% of skeletal muscle by weight. There are trace amounts of carbohydrate in other forms such as glucose as well as things which aren’t technically carbohydrate but commonly reported as carbohydrate such as lactate and citrate.
dr_wtf
#21
I read somewhere that some inuit-like people who eat meat/fish exclusively are not in ketosis because really fresh meat contains about 15% carbs. I guess, as you said, in the form of glycogen.
I track carbs on keto in a rather simple way. My general approach is I don’t buy things that are high in carbs so I cant cook anything that is high in carbs.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#22
It would be highly interesting to see where that notion comes from. Did someone go to the Arctic to measure Inuit glucose and insulin levels? Not to mention their ketones? And who studied whale meat to determine its glycogen levels? That would be fascinating to read about.
On the other hand, if “really fresh meat” refers to recently-killed grain-finished beef, then the whole argument goes out the window.
dr_wtf
#23
They eat walruses, seals and stuff like that. Really fresh means they kill it and eat it raw right away. What they do not eat gets frozen - because it is cold. So even the frozen meat is really fresh and keeps the carbs on.
And yes, they went there and did exactly what you say. It might have been a documentary I saw. I really don’t remember…