Problem keeping an eye on the food

Marckus_E · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 09:55 AM

Hi!

I have a huge problem, i don't cook the food but my mom does and i can't tell how much calorires and that is in the food. I really know that the food ain't the best but what can you do?

it is moms food

Should i take controll and make my own food?

/Best regards
Marcus

Glamdring · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 10:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marckus_E

Hi!

I have a huge problem, i don't cook the food but my mom does and i can't tell how much calorires and that is in the food. I really know that the food ain't the best but what can you do?

it is moms food

Should i take controll and make my own food?

/Best regards
Marcus

Why not just explain to your mom what it is that you're trying to do? Tell her you'd like to just have pork chops and green beans or something. If she's anything like my mom she thinks there has to be about 5 different items available. Meat, green, corn, bread, mac&cheese, etc... all at once.

Marckus_E · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 10:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Glamdring

Why not just explain to your mom what it is that you're trying to do? Tell her you'd like to just have pork chops and green beans or something. If she's anything like my mom she thinks there has to be about 5 different items available. Meat, green, corn, bread, mac&cheese, etc... all at once.

hehe, problem is that she is tired of doing 300 different meals at once.

So i am thinking about starting to do my own meals and i need help how to figure out how much to eat (in calories and stuff) and how to count it

Thanks for the help!

/Best regards
Marcus

Glamdring · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 10:43 AM

What does one of her typical meals consist of?

Marckus_E · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Glamdring

What does one of her typical meals consist of?

Breakfast is often one to two toasts with marmalade and a cup of coco.

Todays dinner is Meat-loof, potatos, lingonberry jam and milk as drink

A couple of hours later i have tea with suger and milk.

Some days it is less food and some day more..

/Marcus

Specialbear · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 12:33 PM

i had that prob. 2 years ago before college as well. I suggest u buy cheap foods that are easy to prepare, ie. chicken/tuna that are ready to eat from store and then add some vegetables. As long as u prep ur own food, my mom was ok with this.

Marckus_E · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 04:57 PM

Another problem is, i have no idea what to eat really.

I know veggies and tuna.. but that is like all..

/Best regards
Marcus

the_quark · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 07:04 PM

I have a slightly similar problem in that my wife does all our cooking. My solution was to get her recipies from her, and figure it out, myself. This isn't completely foolproof, and there are a lot of reasons it might be wrong, but it'll at least get you in the ballpark.

So, for example, my wife's meatloaf has, for its major (non-spice-quantity) ingredients:

24 oz Extra Lean Cooked Ground Beef (1462 calories)
1 C raw bulger wheat (479 calories)
1/4 C onion (15 calories)

It's very healthy, for meatloaf, actually (especially since she now makes it with ground turkey...). Anyhow, if you add all that up, 1956 calories. I watched one night and figured we get eight slices out of the meatloaf, so one slice is about 1956/8 = 245 calories.

If you tell your mother about this, she'll probably be very happy to help you, because A) it'll give her a chance to explain to you about all her favorite recipies, and B) you'll probably get her interested in the healthfulness of the food she's giving her family. If you're lucky, you can get her interested in providing more healthy food, but, at the very least, you'll learn how many calories you're taking in.

If you need a source for calories of various foods, I got mine from www.fitday.com, or the packages she used. I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives out there. If your mom is at all like my wife, she probably has about a dozen recipies that make up most of her cooking, so a little bit of effort every night ("Hey, Mom, can I have the recipe to that?") can build you a handy little database of how many calories her food is, and you can make sure you're taking in less than you're eating.

Good luck. I was thinking this morning how frustrated I am that keeping your caloric intake in balance really isn't all that hard to understand, and yet I somehow failed to grasp it until I was about 30. I'm not sure if it's because no one explained it to me all that simply ("count your calories burned and calories eaten; make sure burned is always more than eaten; if you want to loose weight, every 3000 calories you burn more than you eat is a pound"), or because I'm thick-headed. But I went through the time from about 15-30 with weight gain (and loss) some mysterious process, like losing one's hair, that had desirable (or undesirable) social consequences but weren't directly controlable. I wish when I was 17 someone had really beat me over the head with understanding my calorie flow and the importance of excercise in staying healthy. Which is not to say that eating less than you burn is necessarily easy, but I didn't even undestand how the basic stuff worked for the vast majority of my life.

TQ

map200uk · Mon, January 26th, 2004, 07:15 PM

Hey Marckus_E,

It took me a while to get a good diet etc, as i live with just my dad and sister (my mum passed away) and i am a student.

Get yourself some whey protein, nice easy way to get an intake of protein quickly, and for breakfast have something like oats

along with what is good, what isnt, chicken, tuna, beef, turkey, salmon, cottage cheese etc

As to calorie counting, i dont do it, some do, some dont, if you want to...fine, but i dont atm,

Eat every 2-3hrs to avoid the catabloc state and then along with that, try and make sure your drinking plenty of water
hope this is of use

mark