I love food. I believe in eating real food. But I have always struggled with my weight. I love food a little too much, and end up eating a little too much real food a little too often. I have started developing nutrition information for all my recipes, so I know precisely what it is that I am eating, and exactly when I should stop eating it. The spectre of buying bigger pants is scary enough to warn me off of that second scone or keep me from shoveling in shrimp and grits like a long-haul trucker.
I use a program called Diet Controller. It references the USDA food database, and allows you to input your own recipes using multiple different systems of weights and measures. Once you have entered your recipe ingredients, you can enter a portion size to find the nutrition data per serving. I have experimented with other software, but this one seems to meet my needs the best.
The nutrition information included with each recipe is calculated as carefully as I can manage. I try to be diligent about weighing ingredients, but please accept these values as approximations. Even the nutrition labels on the foods you purchase are, to some degree, an approximation. There's no way to know for sure that every single Twinkie ever made contains precisely the same mass of each and every ingredient, so the nutrition information of necessity represents an average value. That Twinkie you are eating right now may have slightly more or slightly fewer calories than the 150 cal listed on the nutrition label. You're not eating a Twinkie right now, are you?
