#75Hard Day 53: How To Measure/Weigh/Log Food For Macros/Tracking

▶️ What you will need: a digital kitchen scale that weighs in ounces and grams and a tracking app of choice Lose It, My Macros, My Fitness Pal, etc.) downloaded to your phone.
▶️ Understand how to convert between ounces, grams, and milliliters. 1 ounce = 28 grams = 30 mL.
▶️ If you are weighing something like coffee creamer  which is listed in milliliters, measure it out in grams; it will be close enough.
▶️ If something has a package weight listed on the label, use that to track. Weigh in grams or ounces according to the serving size instead of using cups or measuring spoons. If you measure out a half cup of oatmeal with a dry measuring cup, chances are it will not be exactly 40 g like the serving size. Just dump it directly into your  your container on your food scale once it is zeroed out. it will be most accurate.
▶️ If something like fresh fruit does not have a label to go by, you can either search for it and add it based on size S, M, L, XL, etc., or weigh it and find an entry based on weight.
▶️ For a single serving of meat, weigh your portion raw then cook it and eat it. There’s no need to re-weigh after cooking. Log it as the raw weight. meaning, search “raw chicken” in the search bar.
▶️ If you are batch prepping meat, weigh it out raw according to how much you want. Create a recipe in your tracking app and add the raw weight to the recipe as the ingredient. Choose the number of servings that you want. Weigh the meat once it is cooked and divide by the number of serving sizes. Save how much each serving size weighs in parentheses next to the title listed in the recipe entry in your app. That way you know how much to portion out to yourself each day. Same applies for batching veggies.
▶️ To track a recipe, the same thing pretty much applies. Add all of your ingredients for the recipe in the app and select number of servings. Weigh the entire batch of the recipe once it is cooked and divided by number of portions to get how much you will serve yourself each day. Save it in parentheses next to the recipe title for easy reference.
▶️ There are several ways to add a food to your day. You can scan a barcode, but make sure that the nutrition label matches the entry because sometimes they are wrong. You can search for it manually by typing it into the search bar. You can create a custom food if it does not yet exist in the database. You can add from previous meals by searching in the meals search bar. You can add from the recipes by searching from that search bar.
▶️ If you want to log a previously eaten meal, instead of adding everything manually, just search one of the foods eaten at that meal in the meal search bar. It will pull up all meals with that food which you have previously logged. You can import everything at once or just add specific items.
▶️ You can also import recipes to a new recipe. This is a great timesaver if you make a similar recipe frequently, but tweak the ingredients slightly and end up with different serving size weights because of that. For example, I frequently make a meatloaf with the same base ingredients but will throw in whatever leftover veggies I have in the fridge to use up. I create a new recipe and then import the previous recipe to that one. From there, I just edit ingredients and it’s much quicker. Then I save the new serving size weight to the new recipe in parentheses behind the title.