Meal Planning & Tracking is the most important aspect of achieving your goals, and it takes some time to not only get in the rythym of it, but to also know how to do it effectively. Here are a few tips:
Tip #1 – Make sure all of your foods are an option in your tracker!
I consume a lot of the same foods on a weekly basis, but I am always looking for ways to enhance variety, and work in specific cravings. For example, I was recently overwhelmed with a craving for whole grain bread, so I went to the store and got a loaf.
I can’t explain it.
The first thing I did when I got home: Entered in the completed nutrient breakdown into my SparkPeople.com account.
This is a sort of ritual for me after every shopping trip where I add something new to my nutrition plan– The very first thing I do is put it into my tracker. I often opt to create my own entry rather than rely on the ones already entered because those already entered usually:
- Aren’t entered using the metric system.
- Aren’t always complete.
Tip #2 – Measure individual foods in meals as you go along!
When preparing a meal, it is absolutely imperative that you measure and update each ingredient as you go, otherwise, you will have no way of knowing how much of which ingredients are present in your meal. So how do you do that? Simple. Weigh it all as you go! If you’re making spaghetti and chicken:
- Weigh the chicken before you prepare it and enter it into your tracker. (If it’s frozen chicken, weigh it frozen, if it’s already cooked, weigh it directly out of the bag.)
- Weigh the pasta dry before cooking.
- Put the cooked pasta and chicken on a plate on your food scale. Turn on the scale, and weigh out the amount of tomato sauce you used.
Now for more involved recipes, the principle is the same. Take for example the No Bake Peanut Butter Protein Bars:
- Weigh each individual ingredient as you go, and calculate the nutrient totals for each ingredient.
- Combine the weight of each ingredient (since they’re all dry) to figure out the total “yield;” combine the nutrient totals for each ingredients to find out the complete nutrition facts for the yield.
- Enter those nutrition facts into your tracker using your total yield as the serving size.
- When you want to eat some of the food, weigh out each piece, and input that as the updated serving size.
What that recipe looks like in my SparkPeople.
It sounds a little complicated, but after you do it yourself once you will understand, and then it will be easy!
Tip #3 – Use a “Mole Fraction” to measure bulk prepared foods!
My kitchen is my lab!
If you don’t remember the “Mole Fraction” from chemistry, don’t worry, I’m not even going to bother explaining it here. The principles we’re going to use is the exact same, though. We’ll continue with pasta as an example. Let’s say you’re cooking a big pot of pasta, but don’t want to prepare separate pots of it for your serving vs. everyone else’s pasta. Follow these steps:
- Weigh out the pasta first, and try and stick with servings (Though, it’s not necessary). To make this easy, let’s say there are 5 people eating; let’s get 5 servings. The pasta I eat is 56g per serving, so we would weigh out 280g of pasta (56g * 5).
- Cook the pasta.
- Obviously we can’t weigh the pasta afterward the same as before because the absorption of water will change the weight. We can, however, use a sort of “Mole Fraction:”
- Weigh the total amount of pasta cooked after draining it. Let’s say it weighs 600g total.
- Serve yourself and weight it– Let’s say you scooped out 150g worth of pasta. Now, we’ll set up our “Nutrition Fraction;” divide the amount you served by the total cooked amount. This will give us the percentage of the food you served. (In the case of our example, 0.25, or 25%.)
- Next, multiply that by the dry measurement– That’s how much pasta you were served and how much you should put in your tracker (70g, a bit more than a serving). Here’s how to set it up on paper:
“X” represents the ratio of pasta served, and “n” represents the various measurements of pasta.
- Let’s say we need to be more precise and need to figure out how much to serve rather than calculate how much was served:
- In the case of our pasta example, let’s say you want just 1 serving of the 5 we cooked; and cooked, it came out to 600g. Find out what 1/5th of 600g is: [(1/5)*600] = 120g. Now you know that you need to serve yourself 120g of cooked pasta to get the equivalent of 56g of dry pasta.
Tip #4: Measure and track everything as accurately and precisely as possible.
This post wouldn’t be complete without reminding you of that!