So, coming soon, I’ve got a number of posts I am going to put up about dieting and how to succeed at it. But before I get into any kind of a discussion about dieting, I need to cover some basics, and that includes tracking what you eat. While at first glance, this topic might seem to be self explanatory, it turns out that in practice, it is more complex than it initially sounds. Still, there are really only two parts to the process:

The first part is the trickier of the two, so let’s start there. First, if you are eating pre-packaged food, or eating food from a large chain restaurant, measuring what you eat is a piece of cake.

For food from chain restaurants, most of the time you can find all of the nutritional info on the restaurant’s website. However, make sure you check before you eat the food. Nothing worse than eating something only to find out you can’t find nutritional info on it anywhere, and then having to estimate. If you find out beforehand, you can at least weigh the food prior to eating it (we’ll talk more in a bit on how to handle this situation).

For prepackaged food, the only trick is that you need to make sure that you get the quantity correct (which is why you always want to measure/weigh your foods). First, figure out what the serving size is (it will either be in terms of volume, like 1 cup, or weight, like 8 ounces), then measure out however many servings you plan to consume. For units of volume, this is pretty easy; just use a measuring cup (but make sure you aren’t using rounded amounts). For units of weight, it’s slightly more complex.

First, you need to zero your scale. This basically means you need to subtract out the weight of the container you are using to hold the food. You usually do this by placing the empty container on the scale and pressing a button or twisting a knob to return the scale to zero. If you aren’t sure how to do this, look it up in the manual for your scale. Once you have zeroed your scale, just add the food to the container until you reach the desired amount.

There are two other cases of measurement that are more complex, however. The first is the case where you are eating at a ‘real’ restaurant, and the second is the case where you are eating a home-cooked meal.

In the first case, some estimation is necessary, though we want to try and reduce estimation as much as possible. This is where a portable scale comes in handy.

First, your plate of food is likely going to have 3-5 things on it. For example, you might have a chicken breast, some bread, some green beans, and some boiled potatoes. First, estimate the relative quantity (in weight) of each item and either remember it or write it down. For example, you might say the plate has 50% chicken by weight, 30% potatoes, 15% green beans, and 5% bread.

Next, weigh the full plate and write down the result. Now you can eat. 

When you are done, mentally subtract any portion you did not eat from your beginning portions. For example, if you didn’t eat the bread and left half of the green beans, then your final percentages would look like so: 50% chicken, 30% potatoes, 8% green beans. Now, scrape off any excess food and weigh the plate. Subtract the weight of the plate from your beginning food weight, and divide the weight according to your percentages.

Just to use an example, our beginning weight for the plate of food might have been 1lb 13 oz (29 oz). Our final weight (just the plate) was 15 oz, so that means we had a total of (29-15) 14 oz of food. Of that, 50% was chicken breast (7 oz), 30% was potatoes (4.2 oz), and 8% was what we ate of the green beans (1.12 oz).

Now, you might be thinking, “That’s a LOT of work when I’m trying to eat!” and you are right. However, if you aren’t losing weight and can’t figure out why, your poor estimations in situations like this are probably at least partially to blame. The solution is either follow the steps above, or quit eating out (I normally opt for option 2).

Luckily, in the case of home-cooked meals, the process is a little more precise and somewhat less trouble. First, when preparing to cook the meal, weigh/measure everything individually like normal. If you add something during cooking, that’s fine, but weigh/measure it first. Write down all of the ingredients and quantities.

Next, zero your scale with the pot/container that you are going to store or serve the food in. When you finish cooking, put the food in the container and weigh it. Then, go on DailyBurn (or almost any recipe site) and enter in your dish as a new recipe. It will have you enter in all of the ingredients, a serving size, and a number of servings. Enter in the ingredients as normal, and for the serving size, pick a decent unit of weight (4 ounces, for instance). Then, divide the total final weight of the dish by the serving size you chose to arrive at number of servings. For example, if the total weight was 4 lbs, and the serving size was 4 oz, the recipe makes 16 servings. Click finish and the recipe should tell you exactly how many calories and so forth your dish has, per serving.

One thing to emphasize about the recording process that applies to both tracking pre-packaged foods as well as creating new recipes: Make sure to use USDA nutrition values whenever possible. I bring this up because it is very common for people on Dailyburn to simply add a new food with estimated macros because they think the USDA is wrong. Well, here’s a newsflash – The USDA isn’t wrong, you are just weak. Most food has more calories than most people think, and if you are going to go to the trouble of tracking what you eat, why in the world would you purposely delude yourself about it? If you are ever in doubt, check on Calorie King. I’ve found that site to be almost universally correct.

Now for the second part, recording what you measure. Luckily, this is much easier; you simply have to get yourself into the habit of doing it. I found it was much easier for me to get into and maintain the habit if I did it immediately after eating instead of putting it off, but it still just takes time to develop the habit.

Don’t be discouraged, however, if you forget a few times. It will happen a fair amount when you first start, but keep at it and you will get the hang of it. And it is well worth the effort. It’s really hard to make proper nutritional decisions when you lack data, and you’ll never have good data until you learn to properly record it.