How did you measure your food at 2+ weeks out!?!?!

HI!

I am 2 weeks and 2 days out from surgery and was wondering how you all measured your food at this point? I can only take a couple of bites of something so it makes it hard to decifer how to enter it in my food tracker. I normally take the serving size and the nutritional information and divide it up by the amount of tbls or ounces that I have eaten. Which is basically an estimate. But like today at work we had a birthday celebration and everyone brought food...I had just a bite of refried beans, a bite of hummus, a small piece of cheese and one baby shrimp (everything is on my plan). I am comfortably satisfied and literally just took small bites. But I'm having a hard time putting it all in my tracker. lol I know it's ok to over estimate but I don't want to under estimate either and I want to make sure I stay on track by entering EVERYTHING I put in my mouth. Thank you and sorry to bug you guys!

Oh and I do have a scale that I use but when your just taking one bite of something it's hard for it to show up in weight.

Thanks for your help,
Christina

PS: I'm also very proud of myself for making it through my first "celebration" with food being involved and not overdoing it!

I pretty much measure by oz.  If a serving size is 3 oz and I ate 1/3 then I would just put .33.  I use myfitnesspal so I can usually find a measurement and then use a decimal to put it in and track.  Unfortunately, sometimes it is just an estimated guess when you can't weigh it.

You are right- it is always going to be an estimate, even with larger portions, but it is better than not tracking at all. Maybe don't worry about bites of food and track the measurable protein you are getting. At 2 weeks, I was still on liquids and so my protein shakes and jello and stuff like that were easy to measure. Once I went to soft foods, I still didn't find it that easy to track on MFP until I was eating measurable amounts. Don't stress about it til that time. You will be able to tell when you reach the point that it is easy to track things in MFP or whatever program you decide to use. Best wishes!

forget about weighing the food you need to measure volume, fluid oz, cups pints(lol),ml,liters spoons ect

 

OK!! Thank you...This is a big help! I was wondering if I was thinking too much about it, I just want to make sure I get/stay in the habit of tracking my food. I was supposed to start soft foods a week ago but my sleeve just wasn't ready for that so now I'm just trying to form new habits for my new tummy. lol

I use Sparkpeople.com to track, I love it because it syncs my Fit Bit all together and I don't have to use more than one sight!

Thanks again guys!

Sometimes though, with items like shrimp, in MFP there are only weight or item measurement - like 1 small shrimp, etc.  For those, I would select 1 shrimp, then .25, .5  or 1, etc. 

For items like a "bite" of hummus, there the serving size is something like 2 tbs -- so look at how many teaspoons are in a TBS, so can record accurately in the future.  MFP drives me crazy because there are sometimes several versions of the same item and sometimes they all have different types of measures.

Small piece of cheese -- that is always in slices or ounces on MFP (at least hard cheeses are).  So look on a bag of cheese cubes in the store (if you don't have any at home), find out how many cubes are in an ounce, and use that to record in MFP.

By measuring things at home, you can get the hang of what you are eating.  Also for very small amounts, use the grams measurement.  Many items in MFP are in grams, so I put up a post it by my computer with the oz to gram conversions.

You'll get the hang of it!

I find it helpful to scan the barcodes of frequently used foods into MFP and then you will have the correct info at your fingertips.

Measure by volume at this point. Later on you can weigh your dense meat portions, but for now you really want to measure everything by volume.

As an example, I will weigh out meat for my meal, but everything else is measured by volume. So a meal for me is usually 3 oz of protein, with 1/4 to 1/3 cup green veggie and 2 TBS of a starch like sweet potato or 2 TBS avocado or 5 or 6 almonds.

 

I used a teaspoon and a table spoon measure to eat ...