Comment by beezlebroxxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beezlebroxxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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beezlebroxxxxxx

Counting works for people because it quantifies their food intake. For many people, that's an effective way to overcome a learned idea that portions should be huge, or that feeling hungry has to be addressed immediately, or that feeling "full" has to be constant. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend it to people with an ED history; however, after about a month or 2 of doing it, it can really change how you look at your meals, and snacking in particular. I don't obsess over it.

> - sauces you make yourself?

I don't count them. I keep my sauces simple and use them sparingly. I'm not trying to get down to sub-10% bf.

> - different cooking time in one receive : oignons going first, tomato sauce in the middle and parsley at the end (but still cook a bit with residual heat)

I count them raw, or if my tracker has them, count them as cooked. I don't care about them being super accurate.

> - Leftovers nutrients decrease with time

I don't care. The calorie counts are basically just estimates anyway. It's less a science than a mental game to control your ballpark calories in.

> - counting how much you take of a meal shared with others, especially when you serves yourself multiple time

If I'm making the meal, I count for the whole meal, then estimate for the share. See above for rationale (I don't care that much.) If my friend has cooked for me, I don't care at all, and just try to eat a "reasonable" portion.

> - different species/cultivation methods like the rustic small and dense cucumber from your neighbor and the spongy one from the supermarket in January

The differences are probably not going to matter all that much. By weight, a cucumber is a cucumber is a cucumber; I'm not trying to be perfect, just get a general sense of calories.

This is it. There will always going to be impossibly unpredictable errors even if you measure everything perfectly.

The point of measuring is to be * as accurate as possible *, not 100% error-free. It helps to better estimate portion sizes, calorie / macro amounts. This is enough precision to control weight gain / loss correctly.

A lot of people also get their maintenance calories estimation wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can measure your food down to the molecules but still eat too much / too little.

A lot of people mess up more by doing a maintenance calorie estimation wrong and relying on it rather than counting calories coupled with weighing themselves and adjusting calorie intake up/down depending on whether they lose/add weight... If you use a feedback loop, then indeed it doesn't matter if your calorie estimate is anywhere near correct anyway, as long as you're reasonably consistent and the errors aren't too badly skewed toward the wrong foods.

I did this. I targeted 0.5kg loss per week, and since 1kg of fat is 7000 kcal that meant 500 kcal deficit per week was needed.

I measured my weight every morning (after peeing) and wrote it down, and used it to compute weekly average.

I did weigh ingredients for the first couple of weeks to get an idea, but after that just did rough estimates coupled with tuning based on feedback from the body weight every week.

Had a near perfect linear trend for the year I did this.

Yep, it doesn't particularly matter if something that's actually 212 or 198 is entered as 200. Sometimes you'll be slightly over, sometimes slightly below - just try to be accurate and these small mistakes average out.

Typically I figure out the actual weight/volume once or twice to get a sense of how much it is, then just eyeball it most of the time and go for the same amount as last time I measured.

I worked on calorie counting software in the 00's. We had desktop software that just used floats, meanwhile the Palm Pilot software was all integer math (counting things in 10ths and 100ths when that precision was needed.)

We'd get emails about people seeing 577 calories on the Palm Pilot and 578 calories on the desktop. "None of the numbers are that accurate anyway!" was a sensible answer but not very brand aligned.

And: I think it is very difficult to gain weight by eating to many cucumbers ;-)

Cucumber is everywhere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7arlFeaGX4U

:)

> I don't recommend it to people with an ED history

Your daily reminder that ED means more than one thing.

The little blue pill is probably in MyFitnessPal if one really wants to track all their macros.

I wonder if any fitness watches can tell when their wearer's had one.

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