- Oct 30, 2026
- 15
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Quick quiz before your next meal. The chicken breast you logged yesterday, was that weight raw or cooked. The rice, weighed dry or boiled. Now the fun part, estimate how many calories that difference sneaked into your week.
Raw meat loses a significant share of its weight as water during cooking, so a cooked gram represents more protein than a raw gram. Rice more than triples in weight when boiled, so a dry gram is far denser than a soaked one. Multiply either confusion across six meals a day and your meticulous tracking can be off by an amount big enough to completely mask a deficit or a surplus, which explains a lot of confused threads about stalled cuts and dirty bulk disasters posted by people tracking with religious precision.
The sneaky part is where the error hides. Most tracking databases default to one convention, users weigh with the other, and neither side says anything out loud. So two people swapping macros can be speaking different languages while both sounding confident.
When you weigh, which convention do you use, raw or cooked, and did you double check your app matches it, or is that drawer you have been eyeballing until now. Bonus question for the cutting crowd, how long did you spin your wheels before checking this, because it got me for way too long.
Raw meat loses a significant share of its weight as water during cooking, so a cooked gram represents more protein than a raw gram. Rice more than triples in weight when boiled, so a dry gram is far denser than a soaked one. Multiply either confusion across six meals a day and your meticulous tracking can be off by an amount big enough to completely mask a deficit or a surplus, which explains a lot of confused threads about stalled cuts and dirty bulk disasters posted by people tracking with religious precision.
The sneaky part is where the error hides. Most tracking databases default to one convention, users weigh with the other, and neither side says anything out loud. So two people swapping macros can be speaking different languages while both sounding confident.
When you weigh, which convention do you use, raw or cooked, and did you double check your app matches it, or is that drawer you have been eyeballing until now. Bonus question for the cutting crowd, how long did you spin your wheels before checking this, because it got me for way too long.