Do you track your food weight or volume?

Hi OH friends,

This question has been weighing heavily on me for a few days so I want to do a "poll".

Since surgery, I have been faithfully weighing my food on my handy dandy digital kitchen scale whenever possible.  I am still not very good at guessing how much a piece of meat weighs, for example, so I weigh it when I am home.  My NUTs plan calls for X ounces of food, and it's hard to put rotisserie chicken in a cup, for example, so I thought weighing was the best.

Well I got a Chipotle burrito bowl (minus rice or beans) the other day and I have been eating it for every single meal.  I put some in a small tupperware container and it weighs 6 oz.  On a whim, I took out a measuring cup and checked how much volume the container is.  It's slightly less than a cup.

So knowing there is likely not one "right" answer...in your opinion, should I consider my leftovers to be 6 oz of chipotle (peppers, chicken, guac, onions, salsa, etc) or to be 7/8 of a cup?  When people say you can eat a cup of food, should I still be weighing it and make sure I eat a half only, which is 3 or 4 oz?

Just curious what y'all do...

I edited this to add that I ate until I felt satiated and my nose started running (my body's signal that I am done) and weighed the leftovers and it was 3.4 oz that I ended up eating.  

Thanks!  Em

My surgeon stressed to us it is not the weight we should measure but the volume. I hope this helps. :)

I go by weight, since when I track it in myfitnesspal, its much easier to track weight since that doesnt change, you can smash things down more to add more to a cup, but it would weight more. I use the logic that 1 pound of fat is not the same as 1 pound of muscle, even though they are both 1 pound. The look very different.

What a great picture.

You know.. I think I may have misunderstood the question. My answer was in reference to how much we eat. She said my pouch will be 4oz and told us to not eat more than 4 oz of food. Then she said to measure volume not weight bc it is 4oz of space.

I hope I didn't mess you up. I just misunderstood what you were asking I think. :)

It depends what the food is. Anything can be weighed, but that's not always how the food's calories/nutrients are calculated. For instance, 4oz of milk would be measured by volume, but 4oz of chicken would be measured by weight. Typically liquid food is by volume and solid food is by weight. This applies when you're tracking calories, of course. 

When you're thinking about how much food to put into your pouch - that's a totally different thing. If your pouch can hold 4 ounces of food - that's not a weight thing, that's a volume thing. So whatever solid food can fit into a half-cup measuring cup is what your pouch would be able to hold (whether it weighs a pound or an ounce). 

hth

Pam

Personally I neither weigh or measure the food. I serv myself small portions of food and try really hard to listen to my body and stop when pleasantly full. This as you know can be very different depending on the food. Two small bites of a hamburger can bring me close to nausea while soup or stew could be a cup or more so by using a small bowl to serve myself acts as a reminder that I should be full if I have finished it. 

Chipotle rice bowls have been a favorite of mine for lunch. Prior to surgery a bowl with a bag of chips would be lunch. Now I get a bowl of rice, black beans, double chicken for protein and salsa which makes four meals for me! Each lunch time I put some in a mug and microwave it with a little water.

I use the mug t heat most of my meals at lunch. One mug is one meal which keeps it simple and less stressfull. 

I weigh and measure when I can and eyeball it when I am out, along with stopping when I am starting to feel full.  I have not had Chipotle yet, but have had fajitas, without the tortilla.  I separated the chicken from the veggies to weigh  it and measure the veggies with my leftovers.

Early out, measuring by volume is a good idea, to avoid eating too much volume and hurting yourself.

But if you are measuring to track calories and macros, it would be measuring cups for liquids, and a scale for solids. If you use MyFitnessPal, just go by whatever is in the database.

Weighing for solids gives you a far, far more accurate calorie count. If you go by volume, you will be off by a huge percentage.