Dec. 1, 2023

Fundamentals: Tracking Calories

In this episode, we touch upon the crucial role of tracking calories for effective weight management, advocating the use of popular apps like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer to log food intake accurately.

We also stress the importance of owning a kitchen scale for precise measurement of food portions. Emphasis is placed on tracking high calorie-dense food items such as oils, peanut butter and cheeses.

We also share a variety of new vegan, high-protein, holiday-themed recipes – such as a chocolate-vanilla pudding pie, TVP chocolate chip cookies, and gingerbread cheesecake.

Lastly, we ask listeners for recipe suggestions for the upcoming Veganuary and discuss what the next episode will cover – determining your ideal calorie intake.

Reference Links:

Kitchen Scale - https://amzn.to/3uMyPAG (This is an affiliate link, you can also just search amazon for "kitchen scale" on your own)

MyFitnessPal - https://www.myfitnesspal.com/
Cronometer - https://cronometer.com/

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:26 The Importance of Tracking Calories
00:43 Using Apps for Calorie Tracking
01:28 Tips for Accurate Food Tracking
02:50 Creating Recipes in MyFitnessPal
03:31 Investing in a Food Scale
03:43 Upcoming Topics and Listener Engagement
04:02 Sharing New Vegan Recipes
07:58 Preparing for Veganuary
08:42 Closing Remarks and Future Plans

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00:00 - Intro

00:26 - The Importance of Tracking Calories

00:43 - Using Apps for Calorie Tracking

01:28 - Tips for Accurate Food Tracking

02:50 - Creating Recipes in MyFitnessPal

03:31 - Investing in a Food Scale

03:43 - Upcoming Topics and Listener Engagement

04:02 - Sharing New Vegan Recipes

07:58 - Preparing for Veganuary

08:42 - Outro

WEBVTT

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Welcome to episode five of the Deficient Vegans podcast.

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I'm the muscle deficient vegan and I'm here with the awesome protein deficient vegan.

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You wanna say hi?

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Hi.

00:00:08.262 --> 00:00:08.651
Hi.

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Over the next couple of episodes, we are going to be giving you some fundamentals on how to reach your fitness and nutrition goals, especially with New Year's coming up.

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People usually have resolutions, whether that's losing weight or gaining muscle.

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We are gonna give you some building blocks to work with.

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This episode specifically is going to be talking about tracking calories.

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So if you're wanting to manage weight, tracking your calories is the most important thing that you can do because what you don't know, you can't control.

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That's right.

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So we recommend you at least try this for a week.

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We'll give you some tips on how to do it.

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There are a couple of apps that we like to use.

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MyFitnessPal is the one we actually typically use.

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Uh, it's really good for putting in recipes.

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We make obviously a lot of recipes.

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Yeah.

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So we keep all of our recipes in MyFitness valve so we can, uh, eat them and track them.

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Hundreds.

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Hundreds.

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Yeah.

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K Chronometer is also another good one, especially for vegans.

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It'll really break down your vitamins and minerals and stuff to make sure you're not, you know, having any deficiency issues.

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So, initially you might just wanna start tracking everything you're eating.

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Don't change how you're eating or what you're eating, just.

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Start logging it into one of these apps,

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right?

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And you gotta make sure you track everything.

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Oils in your food are a big one.

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It's a lot of calories for just a little bit of oil.

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And then anything you snack on through the day, uh, people tend to not track that.

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But, uh, it's calories.

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It's very important to track

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guilty.

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So if you're gonna track your food accurately, you wanna make sure you know how much of it you ate.

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There are serving sizes on your boxes and your packages.

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Usually they have.

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A volume amount and also a weight amount.

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The volume amount can change because things can settle in the packaging and whatnot, so it's better to weigh out your food.

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So we would recommend getting a scale.

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They're pretty cheap.

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Yeah, it's just a little kitchen food scale.

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You get 'em on Amazon.

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We'll probably put a link in the show notes to like a little scale we use.

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We actually have a couple of them, but they're all pretty much the same.

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Just get one that's on sale or something.

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If you don't yet have a scale, you can just use.

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Like measuring cups or measuring spoons to measure out your servings, but those aren't super accurate.

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So a scale is better, especially for things that are really calorie dense, like cheeses, peanut butters and stuff like that, where just a little bit can be like an extra a hundred calories.

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Mm-hmm.

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When you go to use your scale, a couple of tips.

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One, I would recommend leaving it in grams just because that's what the serving is on most, uh, food items.

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And then two, you wanna make sure you get familiar with the, the zero out function on the scale.

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So basically you'll put your bowl or whatever your food's gonna be in on the scale.

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And then hit the zero button and then add the food to the bowl.

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Uh, and you can do this with different ingredients multiple times to get the servings for everything if you're gonna mix a bunch of stuff in a bowl.

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Yep.

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And then if you're making a meal or something, most of your ingredients are going to be in raw form for calories.

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So for instance, if I was making chili, I would measure out all of the raw ingredients and put all of those ingredients into MyFitness Pal as a recipe, and then after the entire meal is cooked.

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I will get like a large bowl or a large container.

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Zero it out on the scale and then weigh whatever the final product is.

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And then I can divide that across how many of our servings we're gonna have.

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And that's usually how we do meal prep.

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Yeah.

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Uh, if you're just one person, you can just kind of rough estimate it and eat.

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If you eat, you know?

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The meal six times.

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It doesn't really matter how much was in each serving necessarily, but if you have two people that are trying to eat off of the same thing, we like to use post-it notes so we know how much is in each serving, every time somebody goes to grab a scoop.

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So a scale should definitely be the, the first investment.

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If you're interested in, in managing your calories, it's really the most important tool for that exercise can only take you so far

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and then post-it notes.

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And then post-it notes.

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You never have too many.

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We're gonna go into more detail on this in the next couple weeks, but if you wanna start out with this calorie tracking and you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on social media or the website.

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And I think next week we're actually gonna talk about how to try to estimate what your calorie should be, depending on what your goals are.

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Yep.

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Absolutely.

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Got a lot to go into on that.

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Alright, next up we wanna talk about some of the recipes we have out since the last time we talked.

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We were focusing on, uh, Thanksgiving recipes there for a while.

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Now we're kinda moving into Christmas recipes, but also just some general purpose stuff that's high protein and delicious.

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So yeah, you wanna talk about some of those?

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Absolutely.

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Okay, so the first one I'm really excited about is we made a, oh, well, we, right, she made a chocolate vanilla pudding pie that is, uh, really outstanding and 20% protein.

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It's, uh, pretty delicious.

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It's, it's literally like eating a big bowl of pudding with some, uh, peanut butter crumble on top.

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So for this recipe, we used a pre-made chocolate cookie base, and then we made silk and tofu into a chocolate pudding and also a vanilla pudding.

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Then we crumbled on top.

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Peanut butter, powdered sugar crumble, and it is a delicious combination of flavors.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Uh, next up we made some high protein TVP chocolate chip cookies.

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Everybody knows chocolate chip cookies.

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You probably haven't had any made out of TVP.

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They're actually really good and really soft.

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I like my cookies to be really soft, so it's really awesome.

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Yeah.

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And.

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I think they're better than Lenny and Larry's.

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Oh, abs, absolutely.

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That's a pretty low bar, but, uh, more protein, less money and more taste for sure.

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Yeah.

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We went and looked at the macros and Lenny and Larry's are, I don't know, like 15 ish.

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Yeah.

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Percent.

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And ours are 30%.

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And obviously cost wise it's a lot cheaper to make your own than to buy Lenny and Larry's.

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Right.

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But these are really great.

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And the good thing about the TVP use in this is you don't need to rehydrate it, so it takes.

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Literally 15 minutes to make these.

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Yeah.

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Cool.

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And then we've kind of continued the pie slash cheesecake game here.

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We've been playing with some gingerbread cheesecake.

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That's really good.

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Yeah.

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TVP crust sounds weird.

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Freaking delicious.

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Actually,

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also, 38% protein.

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Yeah, 38% protein.

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And it has a tofu.

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Filling.

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Yeah, it tastes like gingerbread.

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Another one that we used in a lot of different stuff is actually a condensed mushroom soup that's kinda like the Campbell soup, but veganized and high protein.

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Yeah, it is very handy for a lot of casseroles, use condensed mushroom soup, and since that is not vegan.

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We made our own and it's high protein, so pretty much anything you put it in will become more protein.

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And we all like that, right?

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Oh, yeah.

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Also a hash brown casserole.

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This one's not high protein.

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It does have more protein than probably any other hash brown casserole you've ever eaten.

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Yeah.

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And tastes just as great.

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So

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it was dangerously good actually.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Also, keeping up the potato game.

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We got a twice baked potato casserole.

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25% protein and it's a, a big bowl of loaded baked potato.

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It's so good.

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Mm.

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It has like TVP faking, are we calling it faking?

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Yeah.

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We can call it fake faking bits.

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Yeah, faking bits.

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Amazing.

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Yeah.

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And then to switch it up and go for a cold dish, we've got a broccoli salad.

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Okay.

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Have you been to a family gathering where you have like ant or someone that brings this creamy broccoli salad?

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It usually has like.

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A fuck ton of mayo all over it.

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Well, we have high proteinized it and veganized it and it is, it tastes exactly the same.

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Yeah.

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I thought,

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yeah, it's really nice.

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It's like, uh, real light and refreshing.

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I think people say refreshing for light, things like that.

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Yeah, I've, I've

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heard refreshing used on the food network.

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Yeah.

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So,

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yeah.

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I, I get it now.

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Yeah.

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So it's broccoli.

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Some of those fake in bits.

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Um, craisins vegan cheese and sunflower seeds.

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Hmm.

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With, uh, silk and tofu mayo dressing.

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So it's really good.

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And then, uh, moving away from light and refreshing, you made a biscuits and gravy with a high protein vegan sausage gravy.

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Yeah.

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It's actually like your kryptonite.

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Yeah.

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And

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it's pretty good.

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I don't really like sausage of any kind, so he got to eat it all, which is good for him.

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Yeah, and more recipes like that would be pretty cool.

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Also, we're working on a bunch of recipes for vegan coming up at the beginning of the year, if you don't know what that is.

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Basically it's just a, in January a lot of people will try out plant-based or vegan, uh, lifestyle and or diet.

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Uh, so we wanna make sure we have some stuff out there for the, the people switching over who haven't really made vegan food before.

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If you have any ideas for any recipes you would like to veganize, let us know.

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Again, you can email us at podcast@deficientvegans.com, reach out on any of our social media platforms.

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You'll be able to find those in a link in the show note, or just leave a comment on some blog posts on the website, any of those things that we see equally well.

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So reach out.

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Yes, he sees them and then he lets me know that things happened

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and then she responds.

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We got a system.

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Alright, that's it for this week.

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Next week we're gonna talk about what to do with that calorie number that hopefully you've been tracking from the time you heard this until you hear the next podcast.

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Give it about a week.

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And then also we're gonna have obviously more recipes because she's cranking those out like a mad scientist.

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And we'll have more vegan tips for people who are curious about trying out plant-based or vegan diet in January.

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Alright, so I think that's it.

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You wanna say, bye

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Bye.

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Bye everybody.