every time someone says just weigh and log everything you eat i kinda laugh. like yeah, let me bust out my food scale for every tomato slice while life passes me by. i know how to count calories, i even taught my wife how to count calories, but she’s the one cooking (i can’t cook). she doesn’t have the patience to log every drop of oil or random handful of veggies, so half the time we just don’t track at all.
recently we started messing with those AI tools where you snap a pic and it spits out calories/macros. are they perfect? nope. sometimes it misses the sneaky spoon of peanut butter or underestimates oil. but it’s good enough to keep us consistent, and honestly, that beats burning out on obsessive logging and quitting altogether.
people act like if you’re not tracking every gram to the decimal, it doesn’t count. but here’s the thing, i’d rather be 70% accurate for months than 100% accurate for two weeks before giving up.
so maybe AI really is the future of CICO or maybe i’m just being lazy and fooling myself. what do you think, would you try those tools or stick with the traditional way of counting?
by Training-Guidance281
28 Comments
I cook pretty much everything for myself and my partner. I have a really good handle on how many calories things ‘roughly’ are. Ie I know how many cals in a tbsp of oil so usually will just stick to 1 or 2 tbsp so I can quickly add it up. I know roughly how much a handful of tomatoes and salad is. So I just ballpark it – when I’m batch cooking I’ll add it all up and divide by the number of portions but it doesn’t make the process too tedious for me. I usually do it while whatever I’m cooking is simmering away etc
I dont log veggies when I cook, i’m fine with a stray 50 cal.
Yes, I hate it too, but I don’t really trust the tools. Now I cook with Hello Fresh for my family 4 times a week, they say exactly how many calories a meal is, so no weighing everything. And I find it easy too. Rest of the week it’s some soup and easy meals
This happened to me which led me to give up on calorie counting (after years of doing it) for a while, which also led me to gain weight.
I’m trying to get back into it but the prospect is so intimidating bc of how exhausting it is. It also makes cooking really hard because if I want to make anything more elaborate than one type of vegetable with a protein source, I just can’t because there’s so many things to measure.
But also, what are you doing on this sub if your daily calories are 2000+? 😭😭
weighing everything is part of my routine, i meal prep, so i only need to do it a couple times a week, it takes me no more than 10 minutes and i think that’s definitely worth it to have peace of mind.
i understand that your wife doesn’t have the patience to do it, i know you’re not looking for a recommendation, but if it were me, i would just weigh the ingredients while she cooks. you can weigh the olive oil bottle, reset the scale to zero and weigh it after pouring in the dish to see how much was poured, no need to dirty a different bowl. i quickly write down the info in a notebook and log them in my app later so i don’t need to look for the ingredients and lose my flow. there are little tricks that make it easy.
i personally don’t trust these tools and wouldn’t use them even in a pinch. if i don’t have my kitchen scale, i’d rather estimate stuff in cups/tbsp myself and have a ballpark this way.
however, do what’s best for you. in the end, it’s your body, your time and your health.
The cycle for me is going strong for about a month, drop 5 pounds, get fatigued of calorie counting, stop, gain that weight back, rinse, then repeat. Increasing my calorie budget has been keeping me together.
I am one who measures most things and also cooks a lot.
Its hard to track yes. This is what I often meal prep and have set recipes I dont deviate much from. Also if I am feeling fatigued I make sure to get the main ingredients plus any oils or fats, and might be more inclined to skip logging things like veggies if im over it with logging a million things.
I’d love to have the energy to weigh everything and have all the macros down to the milligram but it’s fine to eye it
i found the best strategy to be super precise for about a month and once you get the idea of how your daily budget looks you just wing it from there
If I was eating 2500+ calories a day then sure I’d consider guesstimating things. But the lower your target range is, the more those small calories add up and matter.
Not tired. Just training the mind to calculate roughly without much thought. I don’t have to weigh every meal every day for the rest of my life. Just need to do it for long enough to get my mind to calculate the calorie count roughly without much deviation. That’s the goal. Once we achieve this, it doesn’t matter if we are weighing everything daily. Focus on the habit formation and do not look at it like a everyday chore.
There are a lot of videos on this topic. AI is way too unreliable for this
It’s just muscle memory for me after a few weeks, so because it’s just part of my routine, like brushing my teeth it loading the dishwasher, it doesn’t feel tiring, especially when I can save my homemade recipes to my tracking app. It always feels intimidating when i take breaks for holidays though and have to get back into it so I am going to try and use AI for those occasions to keep up the habit
We shouldn’t be using AI to try and solve all of our problems. The environmental impacts of AI are enormous and it isn’t worth it. Plus, I wouldn’t trust what it puts out.
I have kids and a partner who loves cooking. I weigh things as much as I can. I make my own breakfast. My own lunch. That’s 2/3 of my meals right there. My husband typically makes dinner but weeknights we keep it simple enough it’s not hard to keep up tracking. I guesstimate a lot for the meals I’m not making, but it’s fine. I may be off, but I’m likely not monumentally off. He puts my sauces on the side. I do my best to track. Then carry on!
All that aside, the pasta sauce looks delicious, details?
How about getting on of those plates that are divided up. Like a section that holds the amount of meat you need, and a section for the carbs etc. Something like this. https://a.co/d/0m05TB4
Also; you can never track 100%. Even food brands have leeway when it comes to how many calories are in their products.
I know a bowl of hot food is usually 500-600 calories. Two of those a day and I can have some snacks.
I have a calorie budget of 1500 a day, but I want to drink and eat junk food on the weekends. So I try to stay at roughly 1200 during week days and budget in 1200 extra calories for the weekend. By the end of the week it probably adds up
I also get tired but I’m only weighting my food until I hit my goal weight, then I’m just being mindful with what I eat. I’m active and relatively tall for a woman, so my maintenance is around 2000-2100 which is very doable considering what I usually eat.
When I’m losing weight I just sorta eyeball it high and then add a teaspoon of oil to every meal to really drive it home.
When I’m gaining weight I just sorta eyeball it low and then eat an extra snack before bed to really drive it home.
Whatever works works
I did it for a good year or so and it helped me lose down to where I am now, and some days I do try to just count or make it easier by having either premade meals already measured or just eating something like a pack of poultry salami that’s easy to calculate lol. But the weighing fatigue is real. I still have my scale but it’s mostly for decoration now…
After weighing everything for a while, I have settled into weighing mostly calorie dense ingredients and estimating low calorie foods. All meats , oils, and starches are weighed. It’s not that hard and it really doesn’t take extra time.
If I heat a pan and want to add a little oil, I will put oil bottle on scale and zero it out. Then pore out a little and put back on scale. The amount will be a negative value on the scale.
I cook a big meal and weight and portion then. Then I dont have to worry about weighing individual foods because at the end itll all add up to the original number. Like I made burgers and I know some of them are probably bigger than others but at the end of the week, I will have eaten like 6000 calories of burgers
I mean if it’s working for u, then great. But if you’re not seeing results, weighing your food is definitely necessary.
I focus on fats, desserts and carbs when it comes to calorie counting. Veggies and fruits not so much.
I do a mixture of things, when we eat out if it doesnt have the calories we dont even try it. At home if we make like pasta etc and its easy to track then we do it. But whenever my mom cooks and idk whats in it yea we use Cal AI to guess timate. And just common sense too, like if she made pork chops with veggies then theres 0 shot its 1400 calories for example. Its not perfect because again it cant count for what type of oil or what ingridients it doesnt see. But a mixture might help alot too. Along with excersizing, youre golden.
Nah I weigh everything. Takes 5 seconds and with such a tight budget every calorie counts.