can someone help me with how to keep track of calories/protein?

[steve weiser]

i really want to make an effort and start tracking how much protein and calories i'm eating cause i wanna put on some mass. The part that gets tricky for me is with the serving sizes. Like on a can of tuna it says per-serving size is 2 oz to get the 13g of protein and whatever calories(can't remember off the top of my head) so how do i figure out the amount i'm gettin on a sandwich??? with a couple of tablespoons of tuna? measure it in a measuring cup first???lol. should it just be a rough estimate?? sorry this post probably sounds really dumb, but i'm confused.

[Tmoney]

i'd suggest getting a kitchen scale (the digital kind) and some measuring cups. that way you can measure both weight and volume. measure everything when you're preparing/cooking it. then, just use food labels or other sources of nutritional info to get the amounts of nutrients for your serving sizes.

if you want to find out the nutritional values for something that isn't labeled, you can search here:


USDA National Nutrient Database
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl

[steve weiser]

cool, thanks for the link it should come in handy!

[Shattering Fast]

http://www.fitday.com

That should help too.

[steve weiser]

and another awesome link, thanx guys!

[mb1]

Originally posted by Shattering Fast
http://www.fitday.com

That should help too.

this is a great website. I've been following it religiously for amost 2 months.

[JamesBarlow]

Originally posted by steve weiser
i really want to make an effort and start tracking how much protein and calories i'm eating cause i wanna put on some mass. The part that gets tricky for me is with the serving sizes. Like on a can of tuna it says per-serving size is 2 oz to get the 13g of protein and whatever calories(can't remember off the top of my head) so how do i figure out the amount i'm gettin on a sandwich??? with a couple of tablespoons of tuna? measure it in a measuring cup first???lol. should it just be a rough estimate?? sorry this post probably sounds really dumb, but i'm confused.

The best thing I ever did was stop tracking those number.

Not everyone can do this, but it works for me. I eat the same thing every day. Six days a week. I no longer measure to get numbers like calories or protein. I measure to get portions.

I know in my diet were I get my carbs and fat and protein from, so if I need to change something I just modify the portions. A little more here or a little less there and I see what happens.

This makes it much easier to track what I am doing and keep a handle on my nutrition.