Meal Tracking. Cooked vs Raw.

There's no right or wrong way of tracking your food. The only thing that you could do wrong is track cooked food as raw calories.

Food packages contain calories for the product in the packaged state. For example, the calories on a package of ground beef are for raw meat.

This goes for all beef, poultry, and seafood. A serving size is 4 ounces.

For fat loss, I prefer this 92% lean beef. The macros are great. Remember that fat = flavor. However, with 73% & 80%, you will get more calories and fat per serving.

You can make four burger patties with a pound of ground beef—four servings!

As you can see, this 5.5-ounce patty is cooked down to 3.7 ounces. I think it's much easier to track foods while they're raw or dry! You also have to account for oils and sauces used when cooking.

When it comes to meal prepping or tracking a meal, all you have to do is figure out how many servings you are making. For example, if you use a pound of beef, chicken, turkey, etc, for a prep, you can divide the meal into four equal parts. That means each meal would have a serving of meat. You wouldn't have to weigh the cooked portion because you started with a pound.

Let's say you used a tablespoon of olive oil to cook your beef. That's 120 calories, but you are making four meals, so you would divide that by four! Which is only 30 calories per meal. If I were logging/tracking, I would log everything raw, account for oils and other ingredients, and divide that total number (calories) by the number of meals/preps. In this case, it would be four meals. In this example, if you searched for a pound of cooked beef, it wouldn't be accurate. Also, if you had weighed the cooked beef, it wouldn't have accounted for the tablespoon of olive oil needed to cook it! This is why I think doing it raw is better. *Giggity

This is why having a scale is handy! You may think this is just one piece of chicken breast, but it's almost one pound! I like to have 6-8 ounces of chicken breast per meal. You wouldn't need this much protein in one meal.

Regarding sausage, a serving size is measured as cooked, not raw! Also, a serving of sausage does not consist of four ounces; it is two ounces! All this information is listed on the nutrition label.

Now, for rice and pasta, I like to weigh everything dry. With your meat, it's going to shrink during the cooking process. With rice and pasta, it's the opposite. It's going to expand in size. This pasta serving size is 56 grams. Once it's cooked, it can be expanded to 112 grams. It's much easier to weigh the pasta when it's dry. Sometimes, I cook the whole box and divide it by the number of meals.

I used four servings of pasta and a pound of ground beef for this pasta. It was easy to track because I weighed out everything dry/raw.

I would weigh everything raw for tracking purposes, but you can weigh your cooked food and divide that number into equal-sized meals for portioning. You can eyeball it! I have you guys track day to day but think about your calories week to week. If you are going to eat the prep throughout the week, those calories will be tracked and accounted for, so you don't have to stress about the precise amount of food per container!

If you need an affordable food scale, I have one linked to my Amazon storefront! https://www.amazon.com/shop/jalenprimus?ref_=cm_sw_r_apann_aips

I don't expect you guys to track daily for the rest of your life. Spending a couple of weeks with consistent tracking will help achieve long-term success! I'm okay with you guys uploading meal photos instead of meal tracking. If meal tracking helps you, then continue to do it!

Check out this helpful blog for tracking fast food and using a food scale. https://jalenprimus60.wixsite.com/wellness/post/tracking-fast-food-chick-fil-a-edition

Check out my website/wellness app for weekly helpful content and motivation! Sign up today if you're not on an active workout or meal plan! https://www.trainerize.me/profile/jalenprimus/Jalen.Primus/

Have a great rest of your day! Happy Taco Tuesday. Here's the latest Taco recipe.

https://jalenprimus60.wixsite.com/wellness/post/shredded-chicken-tacos-recipe