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#21
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Twenty-five pounds three months
Roger Zoul wrote:
Sure, if you only eat the same foods everyday. What if you change things up? The slabs of salmon I have will be much better at one in than the other. So while I'm going to presumably eat all of it, the fact that their weight can be so different will mean that I could be getting way more or way fewer calories than I think I am. And when you combine that with the fact that you might either other foods, problems will crop up. Saying that it averages out doesn't mean it will. It averages out anyway if you eat all of it sooner or later. I don't do that though. If I cook a meal that is supposed to have 4 servings, it is 4 servings. Doesn't matter if it's in tupperware or frozen for next week or whatever, it is 4 servings. Even when hubby is nuking leftovers, I tell him if he wants more, take two servings so as not to screw up my portion sizes. Well, those are your quirks, not mine. I might choose to have more of something and less of something else, on a given day. Your hubby might feel he wants more. Apparently, you threaten him with dear life if he should mess up your portion sizes. No, I don't threaten him. But I *do* have to know my portion sizes to dose insulin, so if he is gonna eat some of the leftover hamburger stroganoff on fried cabbage, he is gonna take one portion or two, not some random amount. I don't spank him for not finishing the second portion either, just leave me portion sizes I can deal with easily. He doesn't low-carb so he has lots he can eat without my "tyranny" anyways as I don't police the crackers or bread (which come in servings anyway if he wants to police himself). I personally don't worry about portions as I weigh those foods that it makes sense to weigh - like meats and fish (high fat items). Yeah, I don't see it; seems much easier to divide them into portions to me. Cause I take half of the yogurt out of the container (I buy 2-cup containers) and save half for tomorrow; if it's too much today, it'll be too little tomorrow and average out. I'm not gonna not eat yogurt for a month and therefore end up in a calorie deficit today that won't get fixed until Christmas. Well, I might. I might not return to the yogurt for a week, or several days. Of course, I buy those dannon crave control jobbies with only 60 kcals per container, so I just eat the entire thing and plug that into fitday. If you bought a big container of yogurt and had several servings, would it really *matter* if you ate 50 calories less today and 50 more sometime next week? It *does* average out as long as you eat the rest of the yogurt eventually. :: I can't see why I'd weigh stuff at home when I bought the foods :: weighed already. Because of high fat items, you can't always parse it out exactly. I measure oils and fats by volume, not weight. I'm talking about meat, nuts, fish (salmon), etc. I don't see a need to measure oils on a scale. The meats, nuts and fish come weighed already. I agree I can't know how much cream is in my coffee or how much olive oil on my salad without measuring, it's just the scale business I don't get as a tablespoon is a much more convenient way to measure these things. Same with stuff like nut butters, a tablespoon is gonna be close enough; I don't need to distinguish between 15 and 16 grams of almond butter. The difference is only 3 calories in a food *that* calorically dense and it can't possibly matter if I eat 3 calories more or less. I don't either....where did you get the idea that the scale is used for all measurements? When I had one, I didn't find it useful for *any* measurements. That is my point. You mentioned high fat foods and I thought you were talking about oils and fats and nuts, which I do by volume. Meat and fish come weighed already, so... I noticed this morning I don't measure raspberries by the cup. The ones I buy come in 12 oz packages. So I just use 1/3rd a package of raspberries in 1/2 package of yogurt. And I don't measure the Davinci syrup at all, I just glug some in there. If it's not as accurate as a scale, I still can't see why I'd care if I ate an extra raspberry today and am thus short one tomorrow. How do you know you only got a 1/3 of a package? What if you don't eat any tomorrow, or you want a smallish snack later on? So you take an even smaller than normal about out, and mess up the portion sizes? Or what if your hubby does? Oh, that's right. He can't and you can't. RoboJackie says NO! 4 oz of raspberries is a small enough portion that it'd be a snack anyways even without messing up the fractions (though I'm very unlikely to eat fruit without some protein and fat along with it). If Steve ate some weird proportion of the berries, I'd just go back to volumetric measurements. I buy half-pound squares as that's the only way I can find raw cheeses here, so I think I can get pretty accurate with the cuts. IME, it's hard to make a knife cut through thick cheese in such a way as to make the peices very close to similar in size. And, given that you may mix and match foods, you can't use the busines about it averaging out, because the errors you make one day may not compensate for the errors you make the next, unless you're very "tight" in what and how you eat. It seems to me that weighing a piece of cheese is getting much *tighter* with how you eat than just cutting the damned cheese and eyeballing it. I buy about a pound of mozzarella and cheddar each month; that's the same amount of calories into my body no matter which days I eat them. But even with rounded shapes, if you know the weight and know how many servings, even if you're wildly wrong on the size of a particular piece of cheese, it's gonna average out. With high fat foods you can be wildy wrong, especially when you mix and match and change things up in what, when, and how you eat. But if my "2oz" piece of cheese today is really 2 1/2oz, then my "2oz" piece of cheese tomorrow will be 1 1/2oz, so it all works out. Same way I :: measure cream cheese now that I think of it. I don't see how :: eyeballing can be all that inaccurate. A little bit here, a little bit there, adds up. It won't *add* up though. If I make 4 omelets out an 8oz block of cream cheese over the course of several weeks, if one omelet is high, another will be low; so it won't *add* up, but will *add and subtract* itself to being the same average amount of cream cheese. But who does that? What if you use some of the cream cheese for something else with some other combination of foods? Yeah, you're eating the food you buy, but you can't claim, unless you're very rigid, that your calories will average out. I am rigid about servings, but not about weighing as it seems much easier to me. Foods vary anyways. If I have a "serving" of a main course and am still hungry, I don't have to choose between having a second serving or being hungry. I can have something else entirely... like a side dish of swiss chard. And yes, I cook a known amount of chard too and therefore know how many "servings" that has, and hence the carb, protein and calorie counts for it. There's no way to measure that could possibly make my omelets average more than 2oz cream cheese as there's only so much cream cheese in the package and that doesn't change no matter how I measure it out. That logic only works if you assume you're always going to divide the block in a certain way. What if you want a small snack made from a celery stick and some of that cream cheese? And what if 2 oz is too much for your snack to stay within your budget? I open a package of cream cheese today to make an omelet. While it's open, I cut it into 4 pieces, using one of the pieces to make my omelet. Tomorrow, I decide I want one ounce to put on celery, so I cut one of the 2-oz chunks in half. I'm extremely unlikely to be confused about the pieces remaining... the one ounce piece is a lot smaller than the 2 oz pieces. I *can't* end up eating too much cream cheese in the long run with this method. Any overage today has an underage somewhere else. If course it has a weight on it...but that weight can be anything. Rarely is it 1 lbs or 2 lbs. It might be 1.68 lbs. It might be easy to guessitmate portions, but that doesn't mean they are right. That is probably the difference right there. I "aim" to buy meat in whole pounds. I'll buy the 1.98 package or 2.13 package instead of the 1.68 package. Why? Cause long before insulin or low-carbing or anything, I never saw a recipe for 1 1/2 lbs hamburger, so dunno what to do with 1.68 lbs. Or I ask the butcher for a certain amount and get it close like you do with deli meats like roast beef or such; a pound of tilapia or a half pound of scallops. No, it's not absolutely accurate, but it's not like anyone ever got too many calories because of accidentally eating 17oz of tilapia over 4 meals instead of 16oz. If I carefully measure each meal to be 4 oz, I then have to throw out the extra ounce or what? Sure, you'lll eventually eat all of the meat, but since that's not all you're eating, and since most normal people might want a little daily variation in their diets, and since most normal people on LC eat foods that are high in fat, your method will likely land them in trouble if they are using calorie counting to lose weight. I don't see how. If I eat a 5 oz burger today by mistake, I'm gonna eat a 3oz burger SOMETIME, so it averages out. If I have a pound of hamburger and make 4 patties, I can be pretty darned sure how much they weigh without a scale. If I had a way, I'd challenge you on this. You can be sure within some sizeable delta. First off, for all you know the scale weight at the store might be off. Have you ever checked? Hamburger doesn't come in a perfect square, so there is definitely a + - delta in your portion sizes. Whether that's important or not depends on the size of the delta and what else you've eaten that day and how you determined the calorie content of that food. I'm *sure* there's a delta. There's a delta with a scale too. There's no such thing as absolutely accurate measurements no matter what you measure with. But I'm *also* sure if I eat a pound of hamburger as 4 servings, I am not getting more calories even if those burgers are 3oz, 3oz, 4oz and 6 oz. It's still the same amount of hamburger, whether I eat all those meals today or over the next year as the total amount of burger doesn't change no matetr *what* else I eat with it. If I make a meatloaf with 2 lbs of burger, I cut it into 8 slices out of the oven and know how much burger is in each serving. Approximately, anyway. I'd rather know exactly. It's not as hard as you make it sound and I do it all the time. I don't think I'm making it sound hard; I just don't see the *point* of the weighing business nor why it's always recommended for everyone trying to lose weight. The 8 slices average out to the same serving size as carefully weighed portions do. It seems to me to add extra steps to weight it as I have to slice the thing anyways. Think of it another way. You're single, so I presume all the food you buy is eaten by you (or thrown out). If you buy 54000 calories of food each month, you *can't* be eating more than 1800 calories per day even if *today* you eat 2000 calories. Plus, it's just not convenient. Meat comes in pounds. Cabbage comes in heads (which is about 8 cups shredded). Cooking a pound of hamburger and a head of cabbage and dividing it into 4 portions is easier than trying to cook 1/4 lb of hamburger and 1/4 head shredded cabbage so as to just have one serving. It's not that big of a deal for me. I weigh the meat and eyeball the cabbage (it's very low cal compared to meat, so that error I don't get upset over). I'd find shredding 1/4 of a cabbage four times and wrapping it and storing it in between and washing the shredder and wok four times to be much more annoying than just doing it all at once and having leftovers and throwing them into tupperwares. But hey, that's me - you can cook however you want to! I'll weigh my cabbage if you come over and shred it every day for me. Plus, it's not like I'm not gonna eat again tomorrow anyways. I prefer having leftovers as I don't want to have to cook three times a day. If I'm tired of a food, I just freeze the leftovers until later. That sounds like just as much work as doing things might way. You freeze, thaw, put stuff in the fridge...it's just trading effort.... Yeah, but I don't have to actively cook three times a day. Most meals, I just nuke. It doesn't take much longer to cook a big batch of meals than just one. A lot of dishes that one might make don't divide easily into quarters. Every seen a slab of ribs that are longer/fatter on one end than the other? What of the salmon? The stuff I get is noticable bigger and thicker on one end than the other. Splitting into equal portions just ain't easy. And, what if I decide that I want to make some salmon spread to eat with rinds? I gotta dole out a fixed portion? Why? Just weight out an amount, get the calories it has, then see if that number works in my budget. I have to eat fixed portions in order to dose insulin anyway. But frankly, I tried the scales before insulin and thought it was an annoyance then also. I'd rather eyeball the salmon into portions. If a portion today is undersized, it'll get made up sometime down the line with the larger portion. My way works because I'm more concerned about the calories than I am eating all the food. If something doesn't get eaten within a certain time, I toss it. Thus, the size of those portions will matter because the averaging won't be something simple I can anticipate anyhow. I don't toss meat and cheese though. I'd rather freeze for eating some day when I don't feel like cooking (which in my case is most days). I *might* toss cooked chard, as it wouldn't freeze well. But you can be assured if I do toss some, I'll know how many servings it was that I tossed. Perhaps that works for you since you seem to be eating within the confines of a fixed/rigid system that you're created for yourself. Perhaps that's why you can't understand why others do things differently than you. I don't see what is so "rigid" about deciding a pound of meat is 4 servings as opposed to weighing every meal and cooking more often. It seems much simpler and easier to me. Also, to weigh the entire wok full of food would need a different scale than one I'd measure portions on, so I'd need two scales. I doubt it'd end up any more accurate when you figure two scales with different tares and all. That's why I'd make a single serve. Stirfry is simple enough to do. Yeah, except for shredding the cabbage and washing the shredder and wok four times; much easier to nuke leftovers. I am a VERY lazy cook. I cook about twice a week. All the rest is just nuking, or maybe stirring berries into yogurt or nuking an artichoke (which is technically cooking, but only takes a minute). I've already done the math for most of the stuff I eat. The page isn't officially live yet, but here's how it works for me with stuff I typically eat (and a few things I eat much less often, I'm saving the info cause I don't want to calculate every time I eat something): http://www.ornery-geeks.org/text/dia...picalMeals.asp Breakfasts are all figured out in advance cause I can't do math before coffee. There's a wide variety of calories in them though, so I can vary depending on how hungry I am. If I wanted to eat low-calorie, I'd just skip the couple higher calorie breakfasts - cream cheese omelet, egg and cheese "sandwich", chocolate nut custard, "muffins" and "pancakes" and stick to the protein shakes, "cereals", yogurt and cottage cheese meals. Lunch and dinner are a protein dish and one or more side dishes. I have calculations for servings, but not for meals, because I dunno what I might feel like eating any particular day. So if the main dish is a bit carby, I choose something less carby for a side dish, etc. Or if I'm not hungry (I still have to eat cause of medications that have to be taken with meals), I choose stuff that adds up to low-calories. So like the broccoli-and-cheese soup is both carby and caloric, so a good side dish for that is one of the salads. There's few snacks listed as I mostly don't snack anymore, you decide if you're *really* hungry if you have to stick a needle in your belly to eat. But it'd not exactly be difficult to just eat half of a normal serving and call it a snack. Well, maybe because you're eating largely low carb? Of course I'm eating low-carb! Did you just notice me here, Roger? Do I have to post about bicycles to get noticed? Insulin is about normaling BG, not so much about calories. Being off because you over/under guessed fat isn't nearly as bad as over/under guessing carbs, as far as insulin is concerned. And the protein isn't nearly as impactful as carbs, either. I have found the carb and protein are significant for dosing insulin, but the fat (and hence calories) aren't. Empirically, 15g total carb (not net) needs dosing the same as 30g protein. It all falls apart if I eat more than 60g total carb though - I don't eat high-carb often enough to have it worked out for that yet. However, the fat is totally irrelevant as far as I've been able to see; theoretically it can turn into glucose at 10% but I can't see any difference in bg numbers at all from fat. Something like that coconut bark, which is almost entirely fat, doesn't make any difference to my bg at all even if I eat two "servings". Yes, coconut bark is in "servings" also; pretty much all my recipes are. Still, I do have to know how much I'm eating, even if the fat content doesn't matter much for the bg control. If my "eyeballing" method is close enough for insulin where it does matter how much I eat at every individual meal, I can't imagine it'd be that far off for calories where a weekly average ought to have the same results anyway. -- http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/ |
#22
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Jackie Patti" wrote in message ... Cubit wrote: Religious use of Fitday or equivalent using a kitchen scale is the only way to estimate calories. Eyeball estimates won't cut it. I have never understood the need for a kitchen scale. I couldn't get by without a scale. I have a lot of stuff I need to weigh. Like I buy the big bowls of pre-cut melons, some canteloupe, some watermellon, some honeydew, etc. I just can't guestimate that stuff, I need to weigh it out. I've been staying away from dairy recently, but shreded cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, etc. needs to be measured. I almost always measure weight rather than volume. Its a lot easier to put my plate on the scale, zero the scale, and then measure out x oz's of cottage cheese than to mess with measureing cups. If something is packaged, weighed out and easy to divide, then I do it your way. Like an 8oz block of cheese, I'll take a 1/4 or a 1/2 of the package and know exactly what I'm getting. I also buy pre-packaged green salads, cole slaw, brocolli with cauliflower and carrots, etc. I just make it a point to either eat 1/2 or all of the package in one day. Mike |
#23
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Roger Zoul" wrote Oh, HIIT doesn't have to be as bad as you probably think it is. First, I'd suggest you start out easy. Second, I'd suggest you find a low-impact activity, for injury is a major show-stopper. On your bike, if you have a nice 1/4 mile hill (relatively isolated from cars) that gets your heart rate up when riding up it, you'll find that a very effective way to do some HIIT. Oh. I guess I'm already doing that :-) There's nothing but hills around here. Right now, making it to the top of some of them is HIIT enough for me! Its getting easier, though. Rather than trying to pick-up speed on the uphills, for now, I'm just making my rides longer each time, so more hills to go up and down. I thought you meant wind sprints, that kind of thing. Mike |
#24
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Roger Zoul" wrote Oh, HIIT doesn't have to be as bad as you probably think it is. First, I'd suggest you start out easy. Second, I'd suggest you find a low-impact activity, for injury is a major show-stopper. On your bike, if you have a nice 1/4 mile hill (relatively isolated from cars) that gets your heart rate up when riding up it, you'll find that a very effective way to do some HIIT. Oh. I guess I'm already doing that :-) There's nothing but hills around here. Right now, making it to the top of some of them is HIIT enough for me! Its getting easier, though. Rather than trying to pick-up speed on the uphills, for now, I'm just making my rides longer each time, so more hills to go up and down. I thought you meant wind sprints, that kind of thing. Mike |
#25
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Roger Zoul" wrote Oh, HIIT doesn't have to be as bad as you probably think it is. First, I'd suggest you start out easy. Second, I'd suggest you find a low-impact activity, for injury is a major show-stopper. On your bike, if you have a nice 1/4 mile hill (relatively isolated from cars) that gets your heart rate up when riding up it, you'll find that a very effective way to do some HIIT. Oh. I guess I'm already doing that :-) There's nothing but hills around here. Right now, making it to the top of some of them is HIIT enough for me! Its getting easier, though. Rather than trying to pick-up speed on the uphills, for now, I'm just making my rides longer each time, so more hills to go up and down. I thought you meant wind sprints, that kind of thing. Mike |
#26
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Roger Zoul" wrote Oh, HIIT doesn't have to be as bad as you probably think it is. First, I'd suggest you start out easy. Second, I'd suggest you find a low-impact activity, for injury is a major show-stopper. On your bike, if you have a nice 1/4 mile hill (relatively isolated from cars) that gets your heart rate up when riding up it, you'll find that a very effective way to do some HIIT. Oh. I guess I'm already doing that :-) There's nothing but hills around here. Right now, making it to the top of some of them is HIIT enough for me! Its getting easier, though. Rather than trying to pick-up speed on the uphills, for now, I'm just making my rides longer each time, so more hills to go up and down. I thought you meant wind sprints, that kind of thing. Mike |
#27
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Twenty-five pounds three months
"Jackie Patti" wrote in message ... Roger Zoul wrote: Sure, if you only eat the same foods everyday. What if you change things up? The slabs of salmon I have will be much better at one in than the other. So while I'm going to presumably eat all of it, the fact that their weight can be so different will mean that I could be getting way more or way fewer calories than I think I am. And when you combine that with the fact that you might either other foods, problems will crop up. Saying that it averages out doesn't mean it will. It averages out anyway if you eat all of it sooner or later. You're from venus and I'm from mars. That's why you're ignoring what i wrote. I don't do that though. If I cook a meal that is supposed to have 4 servings, it is 4 servings. Doesn't matter if it's in tupperware or frozen for next week or whatever, it is 4 servings. Even when hubby is nuking leftovers, I tell him if he wants more, take two servings so as not to screw up my portion sizes. Well, those are your quirks, not mine. I might choose to have more of something and less of something else, on a given day. Your hubby might feel he wants more. Apparently, you threaten him with dear life if he should mess up your portion sizes. No, I don't threaten him. But I *do* have to know my portion sizes to dose insulin, so if he is gonna eat some of the leftover hamburger stroganoff on fried cabbage, he is gonna take one portion or two, not some random amount. I don't spank him for not finishing the second portion either, just leave me portion sizes I can deal with easily. So, since you've portionatized everything you eat, you've done way more work than the rest of us. Perhaps you should read what you've written here, Jackie. It's amazing, really. When I buy meat/fish, etc, I just look at the price and never really worry at all about the weight. I don't think about how many portions it will make. I just keep track of the weight of what I eat so I can determine caloric content. None of this spliting up unto X servings. My life simply doesn't work like that...and I really doubt if many others here do also...although i'm sure there are others to function in a manner similar to yours. He doesn't low-carb so he has lots he can eat without my "tyranny" anyways as I don't police the crackers or bread (which come in servings anyway if he wants to police himself). I personally don't worry about portions as I weigh those foods that it makes sense to weigh - like meats and fish (high fat items). Yeah, I don't see it; seems much easier to divide them into portions to me. Given all of the other work you've done (ie, the page you like below), I can see that. You're fixed within your own way of doing things and you can't see how others might function differently. Cause I take half of the yogurt out of the container (I buy 2-cup containers) and save half for tomorrow; if it's too much today, it'll be too little tomorrow and average out. I'm not gonna not eat yogurt for a month and therefore end up in a calorie deficit today that won't get fixed until Christmas. Well, I might. I might not return to the yogurt for a week, or several days. Of course, I buy those dannon crave control jobbies with only 60 kcals per container, so I just eat the entire thing and plug that into fitday. If you bought a big container of yogurt and had several servings, would it really *matter* if you ate 50 calories less today and 50 more sometime next week? It *does* average out as long as you eat the rest of the yogurt eventually. Not if I ate 50 caloires too much today, along with 100 caloires too much of something else, and then another 50 calories somewhere else. Then, sometimes next week I might be going something similar, or I might run out fo something and get some more. That's because I'm not "unitizing" every food item I bring into my house into "servings" or "portions". For me a portion is defined by what my calorie budget is and who much of this particular thing I feel like eating. I'd have to transform into RoboRoger to survive with your scheme. It's no wonder you hate to cook. You're probably exhausted from all the mental prep in thing of all those portions and dividing things up. I can see why you don't like the math too early... :: I can't see why I'd weigh stuff at home when I bought the foods :: weighed already. Because of high fat items, you can't always parse it out exactly. I measure oils and fats by volume, not weight. I'm talking about meat, nuts, fish (salmon), etc. I don't see a need to measure oils on a scale. The meats, nuts and fish come weighed already. Sure. But very few divide them into integer servings as you do. That must take a lot of time. I agree I can't know how much cream is in my coffee or how much olive oil on my salad without measuring, it's just the scale business I don't get as a tablespoon is a much more convenient way to measure these things. Same with stuff like nut butters, a tablespoon is gonna be close enough; I don't need to distinguish between 15 and 16 grams of almond butter. The difference is only 3 calories in a food *that* calorically dense and it can't possibly matter if I eat 3 calories more or less. I don't either....where did you get the idea that the scale is used for all measurements? When I had one, I didn't find it useful for *any* measurements. That is my point. I understand your point...but it doesn't work for me. That's my point. You mentioned high fat foods and I thought you were talking about oils and fats and nuts, which I do by volume. Meat and fish come weighed already, so... I noticed this morning I don't measure raspberries by the cup. The ones I buy come in 12 oz packages. So I just use 1/3rd a package of raspberries in 1/2 package of yogurt. And I don't measure the Davinci syrup at all, I just glug some in there. If it's not as accurate as a scale, I still can't see why I'd care if I ate an extra raspberry today and am thus short one tomorrow. How do you know you only got a 1/3 of a package? What if you don't eat any tomorrow, or you want a smallish snack later on? So you take an even smaller than normal about out, and mess up the portion sizes? Or what if your hubby does? Oh, that's right. He can't and you can't. RoboJackie says NO! 4 oz of raspberries is a small enough portion that it'd be a snack anyways even without messing up the fractions (though I'm very unlikely to eat fruit without some protein and fat along with it). If Steve ate some weird proportion of the berries, I'd just go back to volumetric measurements. "weird portions" is very telling... I buy half-pound squares as that's the only way I can find raw cheeses here, so I think I can get pretty accurate with the cuts. IME, it's hard to make a knife cut through thick cheese in such a way as to make the peices very close to similar in size. And, given that you may mix and match foods, you can't use the busines about it averaging out, because the errors you make one day may not compensate for the errors you make the next, unless you're very "tight" in what and how you eat. It seems to me that weighing a piece of cheese is getting much *tighter* with how you eat than just cutting the damned cheese and eyeballing it. I buy about a pound of mozzarella and cheddar each month; that's the same amount of calories into my body no matter which days I eat them. But even with rounded shapes, if you know the weight and know how many servings, even if you're wildly wrong on the size of a particular piece of cheese, it's gonna average out. With high fat foods you can be wildy wrong, especially when you mix and match and change things up in what, when, and how you eat. But if my "2oz" piece of cheese today is really 2 1/2oz, then my "2oz" piece of cheese tomorrow will be 1 1/2oz, so it all works out. Same way I :: measure cream cheese now that I think of it. I don't see how :: eyeballing can be all that inaccurate. A little bit here, a little bit there, adds up. It won't *add* up though. If I make 4 omelets out an 8oz block of cream cheese over the course of several weeks, if one omelet is high, another will be low; so it won't *add* up, but will *add and subtract* itself to being the same average amount of cream cheese. But who does that? What if you use some of the cream cheese for something else with some other combination of foods? Yeah, you're eating the food you buy, but you can't claim, unless you're very rigid, that your calories will average out. I am rigid about servings, but not about weighing as it seems much easier to me. But being rigid about these serving is a lot more work, since you have to divide everything you buy into servings. Far too much work. Foods vary anyways. If I have a "serving" of a main course and am still hungry, I don't have to choose between having a second serving or being hungry. I can have something else entirely... like a side dish of swiss chard. Which, of course, you've parse out into "servings". It almost to think hurts to about it. And yes, I cook a known amount of chard too and therefore know how many "servings" that has, and hence the carb, protein and calorie counts for it. Yep. Knew it. There's no way to measure that could possibly make my omelets average more than 2oz cream cheese as there's only so much cream cheese in the package and that doesn't change no matter how I measure it out. That logic only works if you assume you're always going to divide the block in a certain way. What if you want a small snack made from a celery stick and some of that cream cheese? And what if 2 oz is too much for your snack to stay within your budget? I open a package of cream cheese today to make an omelet. While it's open, I cut it into 4 pieces, using one of the pieces to make my omelet. Tomorrow, I decide I want one ounce to put on celery, so I cut one of the 2-oz chunks in half. I'm extremely unlikely to be confused about the pieces remaining... the one ounce piece is a lot smaller than the 2 oz pieces. I *can't* end up eating too much cream cheese in the long run with this method. Any overage today has an underage somewhere else. Again, that doesn't mean that you can't eat too much food. If course it has a weight on it...but that weight can be anything. Rarely is it 1 lbs or 2 lbs. It might be 1.68 lbs. It might be easy to guessitmate portions, but that doesn't mean they are right. That is probably the difference right there. I "aim" to buy meat in whole pounds. I'll buy the 1.98 package or 2.13 package instead of the 1.68 package. Why? Cause long before insulin or low-carbing or anything, I never saw a recipe for 1 1/2 lbs hamburger, so dunno what to do with 1.68 lbs. See...that's rigid thinking there. A scale would solve that problem immediately. Or, just don't worry about it and guess it. Or I ask the butcher for a certain amount and get it close like you do with deli meats like roast beef or such; a pound of tilapia or a half pound of scallops. No, it's not absolutely accurate, but it's not like anyone ever got too many calories because of accidentally eating 17oz of tilapia over 4 meals instead of 16oz. If I carefully measure each meal to be 4 oz, I then have to throw out the extra ounce or what? No, you'd figure it into your budget and if necessary, leave off something else. Again, your 1 lb of tilapia might be 4 fillets this week and 5 next. What a pain. Sure, you'lll eventually eat all of the meat, but since that's not all you're eating, and since most normal people might want a little daily variation in their diets, and since most normal people on LC eat foods that are high in fat, your method will likely land them in trouble if they are using calorie counting to lose weight. I don't see how. If I eat a 5 oz burger today by mistake, I'm gonna eat a 3oz burger SOMETIME, so it averages out. You eat 3 meals a day. That means you can make at least 3 mistakes in portions. If they all are on the high side, then your caloires are too high. When you get around to those other portions, they may not be balanced correctly to compensate for the mistakes you made before, because the 3 mistakes might be different ones. So, depending on the mistake and what you eat, you could easily end up eating more again. And when you do get around to those smaller portions, they may leave you hungry, so you end up hurting down other foods. Of course, you're in some Robo mode and have done all of the "math" calculations on combo foods - which might save you. But it much more work than a lot of people are willing to do, Jackie. And it seems to not factor in any kind of out-of-house eating for which your "averaging out" doesn't account for. If I have a pound of hamburger and make 4 patties, I can be pretty darned sure how much they weigh without a scale. If I had a way, I'd challenge you on this. You can be sure within some sizeable delta. First off, for all you know the scale weight at the store might be off. Have you ever checked? Hamburger doesn't come in a perfect square, so there is definitely a + - delta in your portion sizes. Whether that's important or not depends on the size of the delta and what else you've eaten that day and how you determined the calorie content of that food. I'm *sure* there's a delta. There's a delta with a scale too. There's no such thing as absolutely accurate measurements no matter what you measure with. With a decent scale, it's delta is way smaller than your eyeballing technique, IMO. Who said anything about absolutely accurate measurements, anyhow. But I'm *also* sure if I eat a pound of hamburger as 4 servings, I am not getting more calories even if those burgers are 3oz, 3oz, 4oz and 6 oz. It's still the same amount of hamburger, whether I eat all those meals today or over the next year as the total amount of burger doesn't change no matetr *what* else I eat with it. I don't understand why you keep saying that....it's not just how many calories you get from meat divided in a certain way, it the avergae number of calories you get from all your foods. That depends on what you eat each day. Most people won't be happy with just a 3 oz serving of meat and will end up lookign for something else. If I make a meatloaf with 2 lbs of burger, I cut it into 8 slices out of the oven and know how much burger is in each serving. Approximately, anyway. I'd rather know exactly. It's not as hard as you make it sound and I do it all the time. I don't think I'm making it sound hard; I just don't see the *point* of the weighing business nor why it's always recommended for everyone trying to lose weight. The 8 slices average out to the same serving size as carefully weighed portions do. It seems to me to add extra steps to weight it as I have to slice the thing anyways. Because most people don't divide everything up the way you do in terms of servings. Why don't you ask mike if he does that. Or david. Most of us just buy food, stuff it in the box, and eat is as we please. Maybe you have time an inclination for this, but I surely don't. If I buy a package of hamburger meat, I don't bother reading what's on the label. I just break off some amount, weight it, and cook it, and eat it. That gets recorded along with every thing else. I haven't done a calculation of how many serves I'm going to get out of it. I haven't worried about combination foods. I can easly add 8 oz of broccoli with some spicy mustard and splenda sweetened pickle relish in a bowl. That's a meal. Think of it another way. You're single, so I presume all the food you buy is eaten by you (or thrown out). If you buy 54000 calories of food each month, you *can't* be eating more than 1800 calories per day even if *today* you eat 2000 calories. You're assuming some kind of closed system here. For one, no one buys food for a month. It won't keep that way. And just because I bought food to keep at home, doesn't mean that's the only food I eat. I may decide to get a sausage patty from MCD one day, along with a large coffee. I may get a salad at work, and get those containers of dressing to cover it. When I get home I have a certain calorie budget left. A 2 oz error in meat might put me over for the day. Or, that error might come from multiple places but still add up to an equivalent error. The next day is a new one, with different choices made and new chances of introducing errors. This averaging out stuff you talk about won't work for me because I haven't done all of the work you have in preparing portions. In fact, the notion of portion parsing IMO is unnatural and something I'm never going to be likely to do. Plus, it's just not convenient. Meat comes in pounds. Cabbage comes in heads (which is about 8 cups shredded). Cooking a pound of hamburger and a head of cabbage and dividing it into 4 portions is easier than trying to cook 1/4 lb of hamburger and 1/4 head shredded cabbage so as to just have one serving. It's not that big of a deal for me. I weigh the meat and eyeball the cabbage (it's very low cal compared to meat, so that error I don't get upset over). I'd find shredding 1/4 of a cabbage four times and wrapping it and storing it in between and washing the shredder and wok four times to be much more annoying than just doing it all at once and having leftovers and throwing them into tupperwares. You can buy shredded cabbage in bags. It's how I do my stirflys. I just dump some amount in (which I admit I don't weigh because it's low calorie so it's likely to not be impactful to calories or carbs). Washing a shredder after cabbage is just a rinse. And who says you need to wash the wok? Just leave it there until next time. But hey, that's me - you can cook however you want to! I'll weigh my cabbage if you come over and shred it every day for me. Just do as I do. It's quicker. I bet spend a lot more time worrying about food/meals/portions/etc than I do. Of course, you're also probably serving up delightful tasty food for you and your hubby. I eat very basic "meals". In fact, I rarely call them dishes or anything because 9 times out of 10 it's just thrown together from what's in the box and what I want. I tailor it all to meet the budget. Plus, it's not like I'm not gonna eat again tomorrow anyways. I prefer having leftovers as I don't want to have to cook three times a day. If I'm tired of a food, I just freeze the leftovers until later. That sounds like just as much work as doing things might way. You freeze, thaw, put stuff in the fridge...it's just trading effort.... Yeah, but I don't have to actively cook three times a day. Most meals, I just nuke. It doesn't take much longer to cook a big batch of meals than just one. I don't like nuking meats. I also don't like having a box full of different leftovers. I can deal with a few. I certainly don't cook 3 meals a day, either. For me, cooking one meal a day is about all I can muster and I feel good when I make that. Ok, weekends are different. A lot of dishes that one might make don't divide easily into quarters. Every seen a slab of ribs that are longer/fatter on one end than the other? What of the salmon? The stuff I get is noticable bigger and thicker on one end than the other. Splitting into equal portions just ain't easy. And, what if I decide that I want to make some salmon spread to eat with rinds? I gotta dole out a fixed portion? Why? Just weight out an amount, get the calories it has, then see if that number works in my budget. I have to eat fixed portions in order to dose insulin anyway. But frankly, I tried the scales before insulin and thought it was an annoyance then also. I'd rather eyeball the salmon into portions. If a portion today is undersized, it'll get made up sometime down the line with the larger portion. My way works because I'm more concerned about the calories than I am eating all the food. If something doesn't get eaten within a certain time, I toss it. Thus, the size of those portions will matter because the averaging won't be something simple I can anticipate anyhow. I don't toss meat and cheese though. I'd rather freeze for eating some day when I don't feel like cooking (which in my case is most days). Sometimes I'll cook a big slab of salmon and just won't finsih it all. Since I don't freeze stuff, I just toss it if I think it's been hanging around too long to be any good. I *might* toss cooked chard, as it wouldn't freeze well. But you can be assured if I do toss some, I'll know how many servings it was that I tossed. I believe it! Perhaps that works for you since you seem to be eating within the confines of a fixed/rigid system that you're created for yourself. Perhaps that's why you can't understand why others do things differently than you. I don't see what is so "rigid" about deciding a pound of meat is 4 servings as opposed to weighing every meal and cooking more often. It seems much simpler and easier to me. Well, duh! Considering all of the other work you've done, I can see that. you have portions built into your head Jackie. Maybe a lot of women do, but I won't know anything about that, huh? Also, to weigh the entire wok full of food would need a different scale than one I'd measure portions on, so I'd need two scales. I doubt it'd end up any more accurate when you figure two scales with different tares and all. That's why I'd make a single serve. Stirfry is simple enough to do. Yeah, except for shredding the cabbage and washing the shredder and wok four times; much easier to nuke leftovers. We already talked about that! I am a VERY lazy cook. I cook about twice a week. All the rest is just nuking, or maybe stirring berries into yogurt or nuking an artichoke (which is technically cooking, but only takes a minute). You dont have much energy left after you divide everything into your portions, huh? The heavy math saps your energy. haha. I've already done the math for most of the stuff I eat. You go girl! The page isn't officially live yet, but here's how it works for me with stuff I typically eat (and a few things I eat much less often, I'm saving the info cause I don't want to calculate every time I eat something): http://www.ornery-geeks.org/text/dia...picalMeals.asp Wow. ROTFLMAO. Amazing. I admire your dedication, though. It must be the dosing insulin thing that set you on this path. You're just using the butcher to weigh your stuff and then you divide from there. After I get meat home, I could not tell you what it weighed. And that label soon gets messed up and discarded. Breakfasts are all figured out in advance cause I can't do math before coffee. There's a wide variety of calories in them though, so I can vary depending on how hungry I am. If I wanted to eat low-calorie, I'd just skip the couple higher calorie breakfasts - cream cheese omelet, egg and cheese "sandwich", chocolate nut custard, "muffins" and "pancakes" and stick to the protein shakes, "cereals", yogurt and cottage cheese meals. Lunch and dinner are a protein dish and one or more side dishes. I have calculations for servings, but not for meals, because I dunno what I might feel like eating any particular day. So if the main dish is a bit carby, I choose something less carby for a side dish, etc. Or if I'm not hungry (I still have to eat cause of medications that have to be taken with meals), I choose stuff that adds up to low-calories. So like the broccoli-and-cheese soup is both carby and caloric, so a good side dish for that is one of the salads. There's few snacks listed as I mostly don't snack anymore, you decide if you're *really* hungry if you have to stick a needle in your belly to eat. But it'd not exactly be difficult to just eat half of a normal serving and call it a snack. Well, maybe because you're eating largely low carb? Of course I'm eating low-carb! Did you just notice me here, Roger? Do I have to post about bicycles to get noticed? Well, it does help with insulin use that you're not pumping in huge carbs to compensate for, is all I'm saying. Oh, I try not to post too much stuff about bikes here. Like the new one I'm getting soon. Can't wait! This will be number 3. Insulin is about normaling BG, not so much about calories. Being off because you over/under guessed fat isn't nearly as bad as over/under guessing carbs, as far as insulin is concerned. And the protein isn't nearly as impactful as carbs, either. I have found the carb and protein are significant for dosing insulin, but the fat (and hence calories) aren't. Empirically, 15g total carb (not net) needs dosing the same as 30g protein. It all falls apart if I eat more than 60g total carb though - I don't eat high-carb often enough to have it worked out for that yet. Yes, that's essential I was a was referring to above. However, the fat is totally irrelevant as far as I've been able to see; theoretically it can turn into glucose at 10% but I can't see any difference in bg numbers at all from fat. Something like that coconut bark, which is almost entirely fat, doesn't make any difference to my bg at all even if I eat two "servings". Yes, coconut bark is in "servings" also; pretty much all my recipes are. Still, I do have to know how much I'm eating, even if the fat content doesn't matter much for the bg control. See -- I knew all of this from before! If my "eyeballing" method is close enough for insulin where it does matter how much I eat at every individual meal, I can't imagine it'd be that far off for calories where a weekly average ought to have the same results anyway. Well, I'm coming at this from a "counting LC calories to lose weight" POV, which is what Mike and I was sort of discussing for helping him get his 25 in 3. Anyway, carry on Jackie. I'm sure what you do works for you. I wish it could work for me, but I prefer to be more foot-loose and fancy-free! I'm certainly not much of a home maker, either. Just some dumb guy. I'm off for a century tomorrow. Yay! |
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Twenty-five pounds three months
Roger Zoul wrote:
You're from venus and I'm from mars. That's why you're ignoring what i wrote. Well, I just tested with high-testosterone levels, so I'm a bit Martian. And I don't get to make testosterone-poisoning jokes anymore. Given all of the other work you've done (ie, the page you like below), I can see that. You're fixed within your own way of doing things and you can't see how others might function differently. Sure I can. I never said I didn't think anyone on the whole planet should use a kitchen scale. I said *I* can't see what it's useful for and don't understand why it's recommended as a necessity for dieting and portion control. Everyone else can do whatever they like; I'm not the kitchen scale police! Not if I ate 50 caloires too much today, along with 100 caloires too much of something else, and then another 50 calories somewhere else. Then, sometimes next week I might be going something similar, or I might run out fo something and get some more. That's because I'm not "unitizing" every food item I bring into my house into "servings" or "portions". For me a portion is defined by what my calorie budget is and who much of this particular thing I feel like eating. I'd have to transform into RoboRoger to survive with your scheme. It's no wonder you hate to cook. You're probably exhausted from all the mental prep in thing of all those portions and dividing things up. I can see why you don't like the math too early... I actually love to cook, I'm just lazy about it. I get in the mood to cook a few times a week. If I did it daily, it'd be a chore - so I don't. I had to become *much* more anal about food to learn to dose insulin. There's two kinds of info out there. There's stuff about dosing insulin on-the-fly in a basal/bolus routine where they only take into account the amount of carb in the meal. The "rules" for such programs didn't work for me. Their "recommendation" for high protein meals is to see a nutritionist to help you not have that happen! Since I eat low-carb, that's obviously not an answer. Then there's the low-carb way ala Bernstein. He accounts for protein, but adjusts doses per meal with no flexibility at all. If you eat 4oz protein for breakfast on his plan, you have to eat 4oz protein for breakfast forever cause you have the same daily insulin dose. I wanted something wih the flexibility of the carby plans, but not needing to eat high-carb just to make insulin dosing work (which would require loads more insulin). In order to figure that out, I had to develop my own system cause there wasn't one out there. My system was developed specifically to maximize flexibility - else I could've just done the Bernstein thing. But I don't find I want to eat the same size meals at the same time every day; I want to choose. Hunger varies, activity varies, my interest in cooking varies - and I'll be damned if I'm gonna do the exact same thing every day unless it's absolutely necessary. You're conflating my diabetes-specific food preparation, which is admittedly quite anal as it had to be to empirically determine what worked and to continue working (as I have to know what I'm going to eat *before* I eat it in order to dose the insulin) - with my discussion of not finding food scales very useful. Not finding food scales useful occured before insulin. All recipes I have ever used or seen use specific amounts of food going in and yield some number of servings. For me, splitting into portions is the most normal thing in the world - and it was before I ever began on insulin. It's not like I'm not going to scoop the stuff up onto plates anyways. Sure. But very few divide them into integer servings as you do. That must take a lot of time. Not really. Cutting up all the cream cheese takes about 10 seconds over just cutting off the one piece I'm using immediatly. Your mileage obviously varies. When I had one, I didn't find it useful for *any* measurements. That is my point. I understand your point...but it doesn't work for me. That's my point. Kewl. 4 oz of raspberries is a small enough portion that it'd be a snack anyways even without messing up the fractions (though I'm very unlikely to eat fruit without some protein and fat along with it). If Steve ate some weird proportion of the berries, I'd just go back to volumetric measurements. "weird portions" is very telling... Well, he *can* pop a few raspberries into his mouth. I *can't* if I want to maintain my blood glucose - I have to know how much to dose the insulin. Prior to insulin, I might munch on melons or berries randomly throughout the day also. I never really measured that sort of thing, too low-calorie to count anyways, and minimal carbs unless you like eat like a half watermelon or something. But I can't do that anymore. I am rigid about servings, but not about weighing as it seems much easier to me. But being rigid about these serving is a lot more work, since you have to divide everything you buy into servings. Far too much work. I've never eaten any food without parsing it into servings anyways. I don't sit down to a whole meatloaf with a fork! Foods vary anyways. If I have a "serving" of a main course and am still hungry, I don't have to choose between having a second serving or being hungry. I can have something else entirely... like a side dish of swiss chard. Which, of course, you've parse out into "servings". It almost to think hurts to about it. Heh. Originally, I calculated for each meal. It got to be a real pain with the whole "net" carbs thing, especially making something like a stirfry with ten ingredients. This is why I switched to total carbs, just to reduce the complexity. I figured I mostly eat the same foods all the time, so the ratio would work out either way. So it's actually a lot easier now that I have my little page of meals calculated out. With the main dishes and side dishes done individually, I can figure out what's in a meal, and how to dose the insulin for it, in about 5 seconds instead of ten minutes. And yes, I cook a known amount of chard too and therefore know how many "servings" that has, and hence the carb, protein and calorie counts for it. Yep. Knew it. Roger, I *have* to know the carb and protein content of everything that goes in my mouth. I have no choice about that. Granted, I don't have to know the calories, but I didn't know that when I began. I didn't discover that fat was entirely irrelevant to insulin dosing until I had been recording for some time. Now I use the calories as a measure of how big a meal is, so as to decide what to eat based on if I'm not very hungry or ravenous. So the calories are useful info, but the carb and protein content is critical. Again, that doesn't mean that you can't eat too much food. But it means I know exactly what I eat just as much as I would if I used a scale. I "aim" to buy meat in whole pounds. I'll buy the 1.98 package or 2.13 package instead of the 1.68 package. Why? Cause long before insulin or low-carbing or anything, I never saw a recipe for 1 1/2 lbs hamburger, so dunno what to do with 1.68 lbs. See...that's rigid thinking there. A scale would solve that problem immediately. Or, just don't worry about it and guess it. How would it solve it? If I have a recipe for a lb of hamburger, and I buy 1.68 lbs, I come home, measure for my recipe, and throw out the extra .68 lbs? It seems much easier to me to buy in multiples of pounds, especially something like hamburger which can be in any amount I want. Sure, you'lll eventually eat all of the meat, but since that's not all you're eating, and since most normal people might want a little daily variation in their diets, and since most normal people on LC eat foods that are high in fat, your method will likely land them in trouble if they are using calorie counting to lose weight. I don't see how. If I eat a 5 oz burger today by mistake, I'm gonna eat a 3oz burger SOMETIME, so it averages out. You eat 3 meals a day. That means you can make at least 3 mistakes in portions. If they all are on the high side, then your caloires are too high. When you get around to those other portions, they may not be balanced correctly to compensate for the mistakes you made before, because the 3 mistakes might be different ones. So, depending on the mistake and what you eat, you could easily end up eating more again. And when you do get around to those smaller portions, they may leave you hungry, so you end up hurting down other foods. Yeah, well that's not the case. My eating varies widely... I have days I eat under 800 calories and days I eat well over 2000, cause hunger varies. I average at 1400-1500, which I know cause I log *everything* - bp, preprandial bg, g carb, g protein, calories, 1 hr postprandial, 2 hr postprandial, amount and type of exercise, etc. I don't throw out a serving of hamburger stroganoff, so I *do* know my portions are averaging out, unless it's something like chard, which can hardly matter much calorically. Of course, you're in some Robo mode and have done all of the "math" calculations on combo foods - which might save you. But it much more work than a lot of people are willing to do, Jackie. And it seems to not factor in any kind of out-of-house eating for which your "averaging out" doesn't account for. You're characterizing my system as robo-mode when it was specifically designed for maximum flexibility, unlike the existing systems. I can eat high-carb *or* eat the exact same things every day *or* calculate every meal at the time *or* have uncontrolled bg - those are my choices. This is what seemed easiest to me in terms of providing flexibility without requiring calculations before each meal. While you've certainly heavily criticized the way I shop and eat, I haven't seen a word anywhere about how a kitchen scale would make any difference! If I make a stirfry with ten ingredients and weigh each ingredient and calculate the carb, protein and calories on the fly, how would that be simpler than using known recipes with known calculations? I use a paperback nutrition book for eating out; but no, I don't eat out much. The foods I most commonly eat are not common at restraunts; for instance, the common example that you can get salads at fast food joints. I don't like iceberg lettuce much, so would really prefer to make my own salad at home. Eating out doesn't do much for me. There is a great Asian buffet at my grocery store, so I hit that 2 or 3 times a month. But I'm *also* sure if I eat a pound of hamburger as 4 servings, I am not getting more calories even if those burgers are 3oz, 3oz, 4oz and 6 oz. It's still the same amount of hamburger, whether I eat all those meals today or over the next year as the total amount of burger doesn't change no matetr *what* else I eat with it. I don't understand why you keep saying that....it's not just how many calories you get from meat divided in a certain way, it the avergae number of calories you get from all your foods. That depends on what you eat each day. Most people won't be happy with just a 3 oz serving of meat and will end up lookign for something else. I don't think the size of the portion is relevant. If you're aiming for 8oz burgers, the same applies... there's little difference between eating 7 1/2 oz today and 8 1/2 oz tomorrow. And yes, ALL the food matters, not just the burger. But *all* the foods average out anyways. I just can't see how it matters if one eats the exact same number of calories per day anyways. Weight loss doesn't occur because you ate 100 calories less today and not occur tomorrow cause you ate 100 calories more. My point in bringing up my system is *not* that everyone should calculate for dosing insulin! My point is that since I'm aiming at bg control rather than weight loss, I have to be *much* more precise, with every individual meal, yet it works without a scale for me. Since calorie-counting and weight loss is a much "looser" thing than dosing insulin to macronutrient content at every meal and my system works for more stringent needs, I can't see what a scale brings to the system. But you can still come shred cabbage anytime! I'll be happy to weigh it if you do the prep! I'm quite able to compromise! Because most people don't divide everything up the way you do in terms of servings. Why don't you ask mike if he does that. Or david. Most of us just buy food, stuff it in the box, and eat is as we please. Maybe you have time an inclination for this, but I surely don't. If I buy a package of hamburger meat, I don't bother reading what's on the label. I just break off some amount, weight it, and cook it, and eat it. That gets recorded along with every thing else. I haven't done a calculation of how many serves I'm going to get out of it. I haven't worried about combination foods. I can easly add 8 oz of broccoli with some spicy mustard and splenda sweetened pickle relish in a bowl. That's a meal. OK, are you *really* telling me you don't know how much meat you buy for a meatloaf recipe? You don't care if it's 1 lb or 4 lbs? And you don't slice a meatloaf before eating it? I'd be *really* surprised if anyone measured stuff the way I do if they weren't on insulin. I mean, what's the point? But you confuse me when you imply I'm overly anal about it and then insist I'd be better off if I weighed everything. I mean, am I too strict or not strict enough? Make up your mind already! Think of it another way. You're single, so I presume all the food you buy is eaten by you (or thrown out). If you buy 54000 calories of food each month, you *can't* be eating more than 1800 calories per day even if *today* you eat 2000 calories. You're assuming some kind of closed system here. For one, no one buys food for a month. It won't keep that way. And just because I bought food to keep at home, doesn't mean that's the only food I eat. I may decide to get a sausage patty from MCD one day, along with a large coffee. I may get a salad at work, and get those containers of dressing to cover it. When I get home I have a certain calorie budget left. A 2 oz error in meat might put me over for the day. Or, that error might come from multiple places but still add up to an equivalent error. The next day is a new one, with different choices made and new chances of introducing errors. This averaging out stuff you talk about won't work for me because I haven't done all of the work you have in preparing portions. In fact, the notion of portion parsing IMO is unnatural and something I'm never going to be likely to do. I'm not assuming you never eat out, but that stuff is separate. What my system does assume is that everything I buy in terms of meat and cheese and yogurt and such gets eaten. Cream has to be measured though as I share unknown amounts with two very greedy cats that I suspect eat more of it than I do. Most of that stuff doesn't go bad very fast and can be frozen. So for me, that stuff *is* a closed system, the larger hamburger today will get balanced out by the smaller one tomorrow. Produce is much less definitive cause it does go bad and much of it doesn't freeze well. I am always throwing out produce cause everything always looks so good in the store and I have difficulty keeping it down to a reasonable level. I go overboard with that easily. My system is close enough to dose insulin, which requires much more precision at each meal than does calorie-counting for weight loss. You can buy shredded cabbage in bags. It's how I do my stirflys. I just dump some amount in (which I admit I don't weigh because it's low calorie so it's likely to not be impactful to calories or carbs). Washing a shredder after cabbage is just a rinse. And who says you need to wash the wok? Just leave it there until next time. Apparently, there are slightly different cleanliness standards on Mars vs. Venus. Just do as I do. It's quicker. I bet spend a lot more time worrying about food/meals/portions/etc than I do. Of course, you're also probably serving up delightful tasty food for you and your hubby. I eat very basic "meals". In fact, I rarely call them dishes or anything because 9 times out of 10 it's just thrown together from what's in the box and what I want. I tailor it all to meet the budget. I shop once a week. I only do one store now as I am not physically able to run all over town like I used to bargain-hunting; just the one wipes me out since the surgeries. I rarely buy stuff precut, as it goes bad faster. A whole cabbage will keep even if I don't get to it for a week. I'm too far from town and too ill to shop several times a week and prefer fresh produce, so the veggie prep is worth it to me. I cut stuff up and cook two or three times a week, while watching a movie or listening to an audiobook. Usually a 3 or 4 hour session. It's a pleasant time for me, but it is tiring. Actual meal prep takes about 10 minutes, which includes calculating and taking my insulin and the rest of my medications. I would *hope* your system is simpler since you're cooking for one person. My husband doesn't low-carb. When my daughter's here, it's more complex still as she doesn't eat red meats at all (used to be worse as she was a vegetarian, but didn't like vegetables). For me, my system is pretty much as simple as it gets. I have no problem with you using a scale, just don't see why it's always recommended as a must-have for calorie-counting and weight loss and don't find the idea useful myself. I don't like nuking meats. I also don't like having a box full of different leftovers. I can deal with a few. I certainly don't cook 3 meals a day, either. For me, cooking one meal a day is about all I can muster and I feel good when I make that. Ok, weekends are different. My husband won't consider a bunch of tupperwares in the fridge to be food unless you tell him specifically what's in them - and then forgets the next time around. I could hide the rapsberries in an opaque container and he'd never mess up my portion sizes. I tend to can stuff for him: chili, split pea soup, baked beans, etc. When he can see what is in the jars, he seems to eat it without needing someone to tell him what's available. Plus the canned stuff is convenient to take on the road. I don't toss meat and cheese though. I'd rather freeze for eating some day when I don't feel like cooking (which in my case is most days). Sometimes I'll cook a big slab of salmon and just won't finsih it all. Since I don't freeze stuff, I just toss it if I think it's been hanging around too long to be any good. Eh, seems wasteful to me, but it's your money. I don't see what is so "rigid" about deciding a pound of meat is 4 servings as opposed to weighing every meal and cooking more often. It seems much simpler and easier to me. Well, duh! Considering all of the other work you've done, I can see that. you have portions built into your head Jackie. Maybe a lot of women do, but I won't know anything about that, huh? Most recipes state the number of servings, so it seems I'm not the only one who thinks along these lines. But it's not just a gender difference. The *most* annoying person I've ever seen on the whole topic of measuring was a woman. That Kimmer chick yells at her minions to be sure to measure their lettuce and don't pack it down in the cup cause you might eat too much by mistake! She's critiques Fitday logs that are at 400-500 calories per day and screams at people they don't know how much lettuce they ate if they didn't measure it. It's pretty damned ridiculous. As if people are gonna stall they ate an extra 10 caloriesof lettuce. And yeah, she insists on scales. If you eat half a serving of a packaged food, estimating is not OK, you have to weigh cause you might have accidentally eaten the larger half - which you do every time, there's never a smaller half in her world. Somehow, 5 extra calories makes people gain scores of pounds in her world. So... I don't think it's gender, no. I did own a scale way back before insulin and before I ever heard of her, just never really found it useful personally - I pretty much know what I'm eating based on fractions of the package and it's always been that way. Yeah, except for shredding the cabbage and washing the shredder and wok four times; much easier to nuke leftovers. We already talked about that! You can do the dishes after shredding the cabbage too. Don't skip the wok! You dont have much energy left after you divide everything into your portions, huh? The heavy math saps your energy. haha. Cutting a meatloaf isn't exactly rocket science, Roger. Even for those of us handicapped with high testosterone levels. OK, I was wrong, I *can* still make those jokes. Wow. ROTFLMAO. Amazing. I admire your dedication, though. It must be the dosing insulin thing that set you on this path. You're just using the butcher to weigh your stuff and then you divide from there. After I get meat home, I could not tell you what it weighed. And that label soon gets messed up and discarded. Yeah, it was the insulin. I never really counted anything but overall daily carbs before. Putting needles in your belly five times a day makes it all a lot more complicated. Well, maybe because you're eating largely low carb? Of course I'm eating low-carb! Did you just notice me here, Roger? Do I have to post about bicycles to get noticed? Well, it does help with insulin use that you're not pumping in huge carbs to compensate for, is all I'm saying. That's what made it difficult to figure out as the rules for this stuff are not intended for low-carbing. I'd have to take a LOT more insulin to eat that way. While elevated bg causes problems, so does elevated insulin, so I can't think it'd be good to take more when I can just low-carb and take less. Oh, I try not to post too much stuff about bikes here. Like the new one I'm getting soon. Can't wait! This will be number 3. The only one I currently own is stationary - attached to a grain grinder. Makes for practical but not very scenic rides. -- http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/ |
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