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I'm finally going to succumb to calorie counting to make sure I leave winter without extra timber, and I get that MyFitness Pal is the go to resource...
But ... when you cook 99% of your food at home, how do you actually track calories?
Does it mean everything gets weighed, until I develop an eye for it?
Does the weighing happen pre or post cooking?
Is anyone able to share some ninja tips on becoming a CICO black belt at lightning speed?
weigh it - MFP will have almost everything on there and will say on what basis (eg: pasta will be dry basis, they can't tell how al dente or wallpaper pastey you like your spaghetti)
In time you'll develop an eye - but be prepared at first to be 'amazed' (and not in a good way) what a portion really looks like.
Weighing everything is definitely required. It can be a real eyeopener how your own portion compares to the "portion size" in the nutritional information!
MFP generally has multiple entries for each food and will often have it as uncooked and cooked weights for common things like rice, pasta and veg. I tend to use uncooked weight if available, on the grounds that it is less messy to weigh and seems like a more accurate method.
Does it mean everything gets weighed, until I develop an eye for it?
It helps, although for the most part you only need to know the weight of the carbs as that's where all the calories generally are. The exception would be if you eat a lot of fried food maybe. So once you know what a portion of pasta, rice, potato etc looks like that's fairly easy. Meat comes in packets that you know the weight of and veg has so few calories relatively it's hardly worth counting.
Is anyone able to share some ninja tips on becoming a CICO black belt at lightning speed?
Concentrate on calories out, it's more fun. I started commuting to work which is 25 miles each day (not every day!), and unless I go absolutely crazy and double up every meal and eat biscuits there's no realistic way I could eat enough calories to offset that.
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is. Generally it's about 40g and that barely covers the bottom of the bowl.
I suffer from pasta and rice blindness so weighing or finding out how many cups to use has been a great benefit.
Weigh everything, doing it by eye is a sure-fire way to over-eat over time.
As above, Pasta and Rice are annoying, most packets will list cooked weight for calories, I guess it makes it look better, but no one wants to weigh cooked pasta or rice.
A portion of rice (according to the packet) is 75g for an adult, although I actually have 100g because I love the stuff, this should work out in the 300-350 calories range, if you've found some magic version that works out in the 150 calories range, you're using the dry weight version.
Portion sizes are the next potential hurdle. If you're cooking for you and your partner or a family, you need to be honest with how you serve it up, if you get Goldilocks portions (biggest for daddy, middle for mummy and smallest for baby) you need to account for that, not just divide it all by 3.
Also, you need to allow for oils, there's 125 calories in a tablespoon of vegetable oil, if you're giving your dinner a 'decent glug' of oil to get it going, you need to keep an eye on it, some stays in the pan, but not much.
The 'correct' portion size for cooked pasta is depressing, I seem to recall it's the size of a tennis ball!
Concentrate on calories out
Is that true? I was sure the anecdotal/accepted wisdom is that weight loss is 80% diet, 20% exercise.
I know when I was last riding lots AND calorie counting that being able to eat all the calories I was burning (minus those that I was cutting) just seemed too easy...
Also, you need to allow for oils, there’s 125 calories in a tablespoon of vegetable oil
THIS! My delicious Mediterranean salads were suddenly 250 calories before I'd even added the avocado and mozzarella chunks... 🙁
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is.
That's because cereal is for children, and is scraped from the floors of flat roofed pubs.
Eggs for breakfast for the win.
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is. Generally it’s about 40g and that barely covers the bottom of the bowl.
I suffer from pasta and rice blindness so weighing or finding out how many cups to use has been a great benefit.
Word, I gave up on cereals, for me a 'decent' portion of shreddies or worse muesli was over 500 calories with the milk, and I'm hungry again by mid-morning.
Two medium eggs, poached, 2 slices of toast with flora (my family like the half and half stuff) and half a tin of beans is a decent breakfast for most people - comes in a 500 or so.
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is. Generally it’s about 40g and that barely covers the bottom of the bowl.
go to a charity shop and buy some chintzy old crockery and compare it to what you have in your cupboard now - our crockery has been getting bigger and bigger over the years. But it only takes a small increase in diameter to have quite a surprising impact on how much food is on a plate. In Pizza terms, for instance, a 12" pizza is double the amount of food (double the area) of a 9" pizza- so a slightly bigger plate makes quite a lot more difference than you'd realise. The volume difference for bowls is even greater.
Two medium eggs, poached, 2 slices of toast with flora (my family like the half and half stuff) and half a tin of beans is a decent breakfast for most people – comes in a 500 or so.
Agreed, although I've fairly recently realised that if I'm having my eggs soft poached, there really is no need for butter, which allows for either more eggs or more toast. Win win!.
I love lidl low GI cob, toasted, with mashed avocado and a couple of soft poachers on top, then tiny wee drizzle of garlic oil. Amazingly good breakfast, even the smell of bacon doesn't tempt me away from this at the weekend!.
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is. Generally it’s about 40g and that barely covers the bottom of the bowl.
100g is a more realistic amount for an adult (and yes, I've weighed it). The muesli+milk I had this morning that comes in at about 430 calories. (Poached eggs + beans + toast sounds great as a breakfast, but would take too long to sort out...)
What has really caught me out is how small a standard breakfast cereal portion is.
I use those OatsSoSimple sachets. Really good because they are a pre-measured amount (27g) and are only 100 kcals each without milk.
I usually have two in the morning, just cooked with water (no milk) then sugar and salt on top. 250kcal for a breakfast that usually keeps me going till lunch.
Is that true? I was sure the anecdotal/accepted wisdom is that weight loss is 80% diet, 20% exercise.
I know when I was last riding lots AND calorie counting that being able to eat all the calories I was burning (minus those that I was cutting) just seemed too easy…
I think both works, but you have to consider that there's 3500 calories in a Lbs of body fat.
Even assuming that your normal diet lets you maintain a constant weight and you're not creeping up, to lose 2Lbs a week (what most think is not only doable, but maintainable) you need to burn an extra 7000 calories a week, or 1000 calories a day.
For me, 1000 calories is a 2 hour ride (moving time, not bike time) 18km and 600m of elevation gain riding around Hopton at the weekend and I'm really fat. I don't have the time to do that every day.
And yeah, I could eat a horse after riding, I've set MFP so it doesn't give back calories from strava, just 'steps' so even though I burnt 1000 cals on Saturday, it only allowed me 200 extra, which I invested in a kit-kat chunky 🙂
I tend to think my calorie burn on strava is bullshit tbh. No way am I burning over 1000 calories on a 2 hour ride. A 2 hour run, yes, not a ride.
I tend to think my calorie burn on strava is bullshit tbh. No way am I burning over 1000 calories on a 2 hour ride. A 2 hour run, yes, not a ride.
I'm told it's actually pretty pessimistic for MTB anyway, it doesn't matter if you ride 10k and 250 metres on a 16Kgs MTB with 2.6 tyres over roots and rocks constantly working your body weight for grip etc, or you spin it up on a 5Kgs roadbike on razor sharp tyres on a smooth tarmac, it calculates it the same.
I think both works, but you have to consider that there’s 3500 calories in a Lbs of body fat.
Yep, I was aiming for 0.5kg/1lb a week in order to make it sustainable.
Strava says a slow ride in to work (45minutes, 15mph, me with gear = 90kg) is approx 500 calories.
Cycling Weekly comes up with this. Assuming a 20% overestimate in the table below, my commute = 540kcal
If I hammered on the commute then the table below (and Strava) estimate approx 700-800kcal. Twice a day this was mounting up! Admittedly I wasn't doing it every day.
I use about 800kcal per hour on an easy road ride. I tend to use less offroad as its a much less steady delivery of power. I might burn a reasonable amount on a short ride but its not sustainable for hours like on a road bike.
I weigh everything every now and again for a week to re-calibrate myself. Most of the time I only weigh when I am hungry to keep myself honest. Scales are always sat on the counter.
My advice is to use it to help find foods that work for you. I found for example chickpeas are a bulkier and more satisfying thing to include in my lunch rather than pasta or potatoes for the same kcal. So I cook a half a kilo of them and they are just there when i need them.
Proper pinhead oats work for me instead of normal cereal. They take some chewing! 100g still looks pitiful in the bottom of a cereal bowl though!
I'm on the same journey and have found calorie counting is a, for me at least, successful method of losing weight. To motivate me to move more and eat less I broke it down a bit. I worked out that if it takes 3500 to lose a lb then it takes 100 calories to lose the combined weight of a 50p and 20p coin. The weight of 70p isn't very much and it takes a moderate effort for perhaps 15 minutes to burn 100 calories. I try to remember this when I really want toast and jam at 100 calories a slice. Good luck fatty 👍
Anyway, to answer the OP:
But … when you cook 99% of your food at home, how do you actually track calories?
Does it mean everything gets weighed, until I develop an eye for it?
Does the weighing happen pre or post cooking?
If you use My Fitness Pal online (not the app) you can import recipes directly from a URL - google the recipe you're cooking, and import it. MFP will search the page for the "ingredients" block. It's not 100% perfect, you often need to tweak an ingredient or two, but it's pretty close. (Once imported you can save the recipe for future use, and this is accesible from the app).
I use about 800kcal per hour on an easy road ride.
Conversely, on the turbo with a power meter, I'll use about the same riding at threshold for one hour!
That did sound a bit optimistic to me, I'm about 500 an hour blowing out my arse and sweating like a pig on my MTB.
My tuppence worth. I've been using MFP for about 3 months now properly. After a shaky start I've come down 10 kgs in the last 2 months.
Lessons learnt...
Be ruthlessly honest (especially about activity levels). I'm allowed a base calorie count of 1,670 at the moment. I'm basically desk bound at work, if I do no steps then the allowance goes down, more steps the better and they get added on - I normally end up around 1,950 or so, more on the days when I ride as well.
Weigh everything. As everyone else has said it's quite surprising what the portion sizes look like. You can set up recipes or regular meals so you can enter them with one line and tweak if necessary, as well as inputting from online recipes.
Look at different foods is a good one (or do the same ones differently). MFP will highlight what foods give you loads of cals for not much "return". Porridge for breakfast for instance has gone from made with milk and sweetened with golden syrup to made with water and sweetened with a tsp of honey and a handful of frozen raspberries. There's an alternative for pretty much everything.
Get a watch of some sort (I use a Polar M400) and use it track steps, riding etc all on one device. Different units will give inconsistent results. The Polar and MFP seem to work well together. The Garmin on the bike seems to overestimate (I don't think it drops the cals that you'd use without the ride - if you ride for 2 hours and burn 1,000 cals, you only need to make up 800 or so as the difference if you were just sat on the sofa)
Is that true? I was sure the anecdotal/accepted wisdom is that weight loss is 80% diet, 20% exercise.
Depends how much exercise you do and how much you diet. If I ride 3x a week that's 12h on the bike. Even at an utterly pessimistic 500 calories per hour that's 6000 calories, a lot more than a 500cal deficit per day that you might manage through diet.
I’m told it’s actually pretty pessimistic for MTB anyway, it doesn’t matter if you ride 10k and 250 metres on a 16Kgs MTB with 2.6 tyres over roots and rocks constantly working your body weight for grip etc, or you spin it up on a 5Kgs roadbike on razor sharp tyres on a smooth tarmac, it calculates it the same.
I think it makes a guess based on bike weight, if I ride my MTB (30lb) on the road it's sometimes really high compared to the road bike (15lb). So I assume it guesses the ride is off road and on knobbly tyres if your bike is >25lb for example?
Freewheeling the descents might have an impact in the Alps where the climbs are at threshold and descents take a long while, in the UK with descents that rarely take longer than 2 minutes that means you're climbing for a shorter period of time at a higher effort, so over an hours fast ride you've probably actually averaged much closer to your FTP than an hour's ride in the Alps which was 40min at threshold and 20min descnding?
FWIW when I rode in in fairly consistently over the summer (i.e. I was doing enough hours on the bike for it to have a meaningfull impact on the overall calorie balance) the calories STRAVA was telling me were significantly LESS than the rule of thumb of 3500 calories = 1lb. I put that down to calories burnt later on as the body repairs muscle etc. So 500 calories in strava was more like 600-700 calories in the real world.
For me, 1000 calories is a 2 hour ride (moving time, not bike time) 18km and 600m of elevation gain riding around Hopton at the weekend and I’m really fat. I don’t have the time to do that every day.
My commute is along the M4, on a good day in the car it takes 50min, bad day 1h20 (bad days would be most evenings TBH, mornings are a bit more predictable but can ).
On the road bike it takes 1h30, on the SS MTB 1h50. So on an average day a 3 hour road ride only costs me 50 minutes.
My daughter is type 1 diabetic so we need to know exactly how many grams of carbs is in everything.
These scales are good as you weigh it, each food has a code and it gives you a full breakdown of the grams of carbs/protein/fat etc in the food.
I use MyFitnessPal to log calories eaten, a Garmin watch with HR to measure calories burned and Nokia scales to record my weight. (being an engineer, I like an engineering solution to weight loss!)
Over about 2 months in summer, I was biking approx 3 times a week, I stuck to the calorie goals (adjusted by myfitnesspal for calories burnt), and my weight was pretty much bang on what was predicted (loosing 0.5kg/week in the process).
It seems pretty amazing that, for example, a summer evening on the uplift at Dunkeld burnt 3000 calories, but it seems to be fairly accurate as the results matched the prediction.
Meanwhile, days at a desk, like today, make it hard to eat 3 meals and stick to the goals.
Freewheeling the descents might have an impact in the Alps where the climbs are at threshold and descents take a long while, in the UK with descents that rarely take longer than 2 minutes
Dunno about you, but I'm absolutely burst at the bottom of descents! Only exception being riding unfamiliar steeps, which isn't really that often.
Has anyone ever seen Paton type anything, or does he only communicate in youtube links? 😉