Counting calories sucks. So much so that although it’s effective tool to help people change their bodies, most people don’t do it (well maybe not most T-Nation members ). I think the hardest part about counting calories is that you have to take a step back at each and every meal and do a bunch of calculating and figuring things out, that it can be overwhelming. I think there’s a much easier way of doing things, which would be to weigh everything at the time that you buy it.
That way you can log that food all at once (weight/calories and date) into your Total Calorie Log, and when that food is used up, you can simply write the number of days it took you to use it up and spread those calories over that number of days as you see fit, and you would enter this data into your Daily Calorie Log (the names are actually interchangeable and there really isn’t a need for 2 logs, they can be a separate section/page of one another).
For example, let’s say I bought 8000 calories of food on Monday (based on the weight of the food and using a food database like calorieking.com). Let’s say a couple of the items in there is a 1.5 pound head of cabbage, and a 3 pound bag of chicken breasts. I could measure the amount of food I eat every time I take a serving from the head/bag, but that’s hard, But how else would I do it? It seems like the only way. The answer is simple: Like I said before, I would simply determine the number of days it takes me to put away the breasts/cabbage.
Let’s say the breasts take me until Friday. Well if I weighed the chicken when i bought it and it was 1200 grams, then if I enter that data into calorieking, it tells me it’s 1540 calories and 323 grams of protein. Spread that over 5 days, and you would log into the Daily Calorie Log 308 calories per day, and 64.7 grams of protein per day.
If you wanted to get a little more technical then you can simply estimate the fraction of the bag/head that you eat at each meal, so if I ate the whole bag in 6 separate servings, then all you would have to do is right down a simple note like 4 strips, or medium serving, or whatever the case may be. If you do this for the 6 separate servings, the Daily Calorie Log might look something like this:
(there would obviously be more entries for each day)
M: Chicken Breast: 6 strips, 4 strips
T: Chicken Breast: 8 strips
W: Chicken Breast: 8 strips
THUR: Chicken Breast: 6 strips
F: Chicken Breast: 4 strips
At the weeks end, you would know that on monday for example, you consumed 10 of the 36 strips, which is equal to 28% if the total calories for that bag, or 427 cals and about 90 grams of protein.
I think this makes things a lot easier. Take it or leave it. This may not be revolutionary, but i thought it up all by myself so even if someone already thought this up or it’s standard practice to some, I just hope the concepts can help anyone else.
Best,
BT
PS May also choose to do this variation for condiments/oils/etc. Since they are used on a much less frequent basis and things like coconut oil are hard to measure, simply weigh the container to determine how many grams were taken out. You can obviously do this on a daily, weekly, or per serving application; whatever fits the bill for you.
PPS One obvious drawback to this is if two or more people are sharing the food. If this is the case some of these concepts will work but others will not, so you’ll have to modify this concept to your unique situation. Good luck!