One of the most COMMON questions we get is something along the lines of “do I weigh *food* raw or cooked?”
First off, this is a great question, and a question that shows you are being mindful of your food!
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
In my fridge right now there is a one-pound tube of 93% hamburger meat. On that label, it says a serving is 23g of protein, and 8g of fat. It says there are 4 servings in a container, each serving being 4oz of raw meat, meaning that tube is 16oz. However, when I cook that pound of hamburger, due to water evaporation and the molecular density of the actual food changing, it will actually weigh maybe 10oz or so, when finished. So do you track the raw weight of the hamburger prior to cooking, or the cooked weight of the hamburger?
The answer is pretty simple. Track your food simply based on what the label says.
On almost all foods that you need to cook/boil/bake, the label will show what the serving size is for UNCOOKED/RAW food. This of course isn’t always the case, but unless marked otherwise, I have yet to see it a different way. Again, the reasoning for that would be simply because when you cook food, it changes density and it will change in size/weight. This doesn’t mean the actual caloric content of the food is changing, it just means that you need to make sure you’re weighing it appropriately.
Getting back to the beef, the reason this matters is because if you did make the mistake of weighing your beef after you cook it vs prior, your tracking is going to be significantly off.
Let’s look at the numbers.
So, in this example, we said that 16 oz of raw beef would translate roughly to 10oz of cooked beef (example only). Let’s say your goal is to eat 1 pound of hamburger a day.
This means that, breaking it down, 1 ounce of raw beef would be .63 ounces of cooked beef (roughly). So now knowing that, if you made the mistake of thinking you needed 4 ounces of cooked beef for 23g of protein and 8 g of fat, you’d actually be eating 37g of protein and 13 grams of fat in a serving (1.6x).
In a single serving, not the end of the world. However, if you’re eating a pound of beef a day, and you’re making the mistake of weighing it cooked, you’d be getting around 50 grams of protein extra, and about 20 grams of additional fat daily. This would add up to an excess of 375 calories in a day, which is fairly significant.
To summarize, weigh your food raw/uncooked unless noted otherwise on the label.
As always please feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have, or to learn more about our nutrition coaching servings.
Brendan & Kendra Harberts
Harberts Health
info@harbertshealth.com