A Common Tracking Mistake - Dry Food

When people are tracking their calories there are some really common mistakes that they can make, that affect the accuracy of their tracking and as a result – impact on their progress.

A common mistake comes when tracking foods that you buy dry, such as – pasta or rice, noodles, and other things of that nature.

I would always advise you to weigh your ingredients before cooking them. It is much easier.

The reason why these foods can lead to mistakes are because the calories on the packets can be given for when its cooked or when its dry.

75g of dry pasta is approximately 170g when cooked.

These are both common portion sizes given on the back of packets and are around 300 calories give or take.

When you can scan the packet or look at the packet, you need to be aware of if it is giving you the value as dry or cooked.

Otherwise, you might input it to myfitness pal 75g of pasta because that’s what you weighed out dry, but it will give you the cooked value and say it is 80 calories, rather than 300.

If you don’t notice, or aren’t aware of this you could be 200 + calories out

Even worse – it may say on the back – 170g is a portion, for 300 calories, but that’s wet weight, when cooked!

If you weigh it out dry to begin with thinking its 300 calories for a 170g portion, you would consume 650 calories, and you would have consumed more than double what you expected.

So you need to pay close attention when tracking these foods, that you are matching their weights up with the correct calorie values.

When you are weighing all of your ingredients do it dry.

You just need to make sure that the value you are tracking is dry weight – not wet weight.

Now you are aware of this it will jump out to you, and you should recognise if it doesn’t seem right. If the calories seem too good to be true, they probably are!

The more experienced you become at tracking your calories and more you know about how many calories to expect in certain foods, you will be able to catch out any other potential errors like this along the way.

But at the beginning it is important to stay aware of all these possibilities to ensure you are being as precise as you can be, because simple mishaps like this are what can prevent you from making progress.