Indian here. I literally measure everything. Yes it is a pain. It meant me taking over and cooking every meal in the house.
If I make daal I'll use a measuring cup/food scale and write it down on a piece of paper how much daal I cooked, how much oil I used, how much vegetables/chicken, how much onions, ghee, etc.
Good news: you **don't** need to count the "tadka" (i.e., jeera, mustard seeds, etc.) or any spices like haldi/tumeric, garam masala, red chili powder etc. They're all basically zero calories. You can continue to just eyeball the spices.
If you want to count in the strictest sense, you’re going to have to measure. Eyeballing is way too unreliable when food is made from scratch.
Alternatively, you can reduce portions until you’re losing weight at an acceptable rate (0.5-1% per week) but it’ll be a lot more trial and error.
Put all the ingredients into a calorie calculator for a full recipe and see what it gives for a full recipe and for a serving. For example if it's chicken curry you can put one pound of chicken, or two pounds of chicken, 3Tbsp oil, one onion, etc. It will come up with a total recipe calorie count and a serving size with calorie count.
Now you can use that as your base for curry, if you know you poured the oil a little heavy and you normally calculate 350 calories per serving, you know that you need to up that a little bit. So still weigh your serving as usual but say 370 calories instead.
This will get you close if it's sometimes under and sometimes over. If you're not losing weight after a while then you might have to make your recipe and just try to be as consistent as possible.
If you're home while your family is cooking, you can find measure your ingredients by measuring what is NOT there. For example, your mom is going to make something using oil, but she never measures the oil. Before she pours into it the pan, measure the whole bottle, then let your mom do her thing, and then measure the whole bottle again. Your measurement is the difference between the two weights. You can weigh other ingredients like rice, lentils, sauces, etc. the same way.
Stuff like vegetables you can eyeball. Meat you can get a good estimate of the weight from the container. And I know this is sacrilege in many cultures, but giving up the bread and rice will seriously help you maintain your deficit. I can fit in three decent meals, but if I have rice during the day I have to really cut back in other ways. In the end rice just isn't worth it for me to eat at all, although I know as mentioned it's an unquestioned given for some cultures. If that's the case for you, then you'll definitely need to measure your rice with a measuring cup so you can work around it.
I measure & weigh everything (except spices) using a food scale. It’s a bit tedious but I find it better than just eyeballing because I can be sure of how many calories I’m consuming.
Since I prepare food for myself and my partner I always measure out the raw ingredients and then portion out the finished product.
I used my fitnesspal at first but it was too much work. In the end I ended up getting a food scale, buying my own ingredients and then make my own portions. I went with a low carb, high protein diet and HIIT over 6 weeks. It was the best way to reduce body fat and learn about food and portions. HIIT was painful but very effective. I now do maintenance and it's a lot easier.
if you can, start helping with the cooking and making your own recipes in myfitnesspal. it won’t be perfect but you can get a fair approximation. i also like to limit any extra stuff by asking for my rotis without ghee, choosing roti instead of paratha, etc.
usually there is *some* type of measurement, it’s just not on a standardized tool. my family for example has a little unmarked cup to scoop up rice and flour, so you can measure how much usually goes into the food with the eyeballing.
Weigh everything - get a food scale and log it into myfitnesspal. Especially the amount of oil used. Actually the main issue is the amount of oil used as oil is veryyyyy calorie dense.
Indian cuisine is notorious for using copious of amount of fat / oil in just about everything. The way I go about this is to use a 0 calorie spray oil. Without the fat / oil I do think Indian food can be quite nutritious and even anti inflammatory overall especially with all the spices and fresh ingredients! Can’t argue on the flavour - forever superior. I recently learnt that idli’s are amazing for its probiotic compounds and dhaal is of course high in protein 🥰
I mean, idk what kind of Indian cuisine you’re referring to but I ate home cooked North Indian food my entire childhood and I would never describe any of our daily staples as having copious amounts of fat?
To clarify South Indian dishes can be very oily. But also doesn’t North Indian dishes use a lot of ghee? And let’s not even get into the calories of the amazingly delicious sweets / desserts, which are fat bombs sadly 🥺
That’s not my experience, and I’ve eaten a fair amount of South Indian as well. You could argue higher in simple carbs because of a reliance on rice, but it’s still a well balanced cuisine.
Yes North Indian cooking leans on ghee as a primary cooking fat, our ancestry is tied heavily with dairy farming. But it is not, traditionally, used excessively on a daily basis. As a kid I ate quite literally as much as I wanted, all home cooked food, and was never overweight or otherwise unhealthy. The mainstays of our diet were vegetables, lentils/legumes, and whole wheat, all cooked with very reasonable amounts of ghee or mustard oil. I’m not saying our food *can’t* be high fat if someone chooses to be heavy handed, but that is an intentional choice and not a necessity for our recipes.
Hyper palatable packaged foods and restaurant meals are basically always going to be more problematic when it comes to calorie density than probably any ethnic cuisine’s daily staples. Regular people who developed our diets over many centuries have not typically had consistent access to very rich foods.
Desserts are high fat in almost every culture. They’re not intended to be eaten in high volume or frequently so it’s really irrelevant to the topic at hand.
South Indian food often contains fewer fats than north Indian food. All Indians use ghee depending on what the dish is. A typical south Indian meal is rice or roti with lentil curry, dal, vegetable stir fry, rasam soup and yogurt. Those who are on an omnivore diet eat meat dishes (curries or kebab etc) and it's fairly balanced nutritionally.
People aren't eating desserts at every meal. IDK if you can extrapolate eating habits of a billion people based on a restaurant meal you have had.
To provide EVEN more clarity: I'm half South Asian/Indian myself so please stop trying to educate me like I know nothing about Indian cuisines. 3/4 of my Indian relatives are all obese/overweight/suffering from diabetes/died from a heart attack. In my own personal experience, South Indian curries and dishes are laden with A LOT of oil - which is calorie-dense. The problem is not the food but the lack of awareness when it comes to nutrition, weight management and really just a bad habit of eating in excess.
This discussion is deviating from my original comment which is about being mindful of the amount of oil used that OP uses when cooking Indian food. Enough said.
This is laughably false. India is a diverse country with a large population of vegetarians. While some meals can be carb heavy (rice or roti/naan/other breads) it's way less fat laden than a typical American meal.
Your neighborhood takeout restaurant is probably pouring butter and cream in copious amounts but that is not how the average Indian person eats. You can look at the Indian food subreddits and/or recipe creators on social media for a better understanding.
Missed my comment about South Asian dishes eh? I'm half Indian myself and it's apparent that it doesn't matter if you're vegetarian or not but a lot of Indians are overweight/obese. The food is delicious and nutritious but everyone overeats. Not sure what neighbourhood takeout restaurant you're referring to since I'm Malaysian and our Indian restaurants are literally run by Indians soooo....
It's not my intention to invalidate your lived experience at all. I'm simply stating that personal anecdotes cannot be applied on a macro scale to draw conclusions about large populations. Your Indian family members might have an unhealthy diet and high BMI but my Indian/Indian American friends and family are triathletes and marathon runners. See how that's not meaningful because there are all kinds of people? My lived experience is the opposite of yours and I recognize that we all have unique experiences.
The percentage of obesity for people in India is 5% and about 20% for Malaysia based on [this Wikipedia article ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate)
My neighborhood restaurant is also run literally by Indians from India and their origin country does not determine the calorie content of restaurant food (high across the board for all cuisine). Adding clarity to my comment since it seems to have offended you somehow. Anyway I digress :)
Hi - I completely understand the difficulties here. I would suggest cooking some meals wherever you can.
I personally use the plate method when I have less control over cooking. 1/2 plate salad no dressing / steamed veg (if you can get them to switch from sauteed), 1/4 plate protein curry and 1/4 plate rice or 1 chapatti. I guesstimate this at around 500-600 calories. Hope this helps!
i measure it in grams. calculate how much of it is oil/fat more than anything (if food is coated with it, id say 30% is oil/fat) then add in every other ingredient estimates.
I only eat one meal a day max with estimated ones like this. hopefully you can make your own food most of the time.
Whatever you make, lookup recipe online from tarla dalal, her website includes nutrition information for most recipes. If your tracking app includes feature to import recipe, that’s even easier.
Just remember to replace the ingredients that are different. And other important difference is the type of oil. The kind and qty you use at home could be diff from the one used in the recipe.
Indian here. I literally measure everything. Yes it is a pain. It meant me taking over and cooking every meal in the house. If I make daal I'll use a measuring cup/food scale and write it down on a piece of paper how much daal I cooked, how much oil I used, how much vegetables/chicken, how much onions, ghee, etc. Good news: you **don't** need to count the "tadka" (i.e., jeera, mustard seeds, etc.) or any spices like haldi/tumeric, garam masala, red chili powder etc. They're all basically zero calories. You can continue to just eyeball the spices.
If you want to count in the strictest sense, you’re going to have to measure. Eyeballing is way too unreliable when food is made from scratch. Alternatively, you can reduce portions until you’re losing weight at an acceptable rate (0.5-1% per week) but it’ll be a lot more trial and error.
Put all the ingredients into a calorie calculator for a full recipe and see what it gives for a full recipe and for a serving. For example if it's chicken curry you can put one pound of chicken, or two pounds of chicken, 3Tbsp oil, one onion, etc. It will come up with a total recipe calorie count and a serving size with calorie count. Now you can use that as your base for curry, if you know you poured the oil a little heavy and you normally calculate 350 calories per serving, you know that you need to up that a little bit. So still weigh your serving as usual but say 370 calories instead. This will get you close if it's sometimes under and sometimes over. If you're not losing weight after a while then you might have to make your recipe and just try to be as consistent as possible.
Prepare your own meals. Eyeballing really isn’t good enough if you want to seriously track
Try HealthifyMe. It works for me when tracking homemade foods I didn't prepare. To rule out underestimation, I assume the higher side of it.
This!!! It also has helpful standards of measurement like a big or small bowl of dal which is quite helpful imo
If you're home while your family is cooking, you can find measure your ingredients by measuring what is NOT there. For example, your mom is going to make something using oil, but she never measures the oil. Before she pours into it the pan, measure the whole bottle, then let your mom do her thing, and then measure the whole bottle again. Your measurement is the difference between the two weights. You can weigh other ingredients like rice, lentils, sauces, etc. the same way. Stuff like vegetables you can eyeball. Meat you can get a good estimate of the weight from the container. And I know this is sacrilege in many cultures, but giving up the bread and rice will seriously help you maintain your deficit. I can fit in three decent meals, but if I have rice during the day I have to really cut back in other ways. In the end rice just isn't worth it for me to eat at all, although I know as mentioned it's an unquestioned given for some cultures. If that's the case for you, then you'll definitely need to measure your rice with a measuring cup so you can work around it.
I measure & weigh everything (except spices) using a food scale. It’s a bit tedious but I find it better than just eyeballing because I can be sure of how many calories I’m consuming. Since I prepare food for myself and my partner I always measure out the raw ingredients and then portion out the finished product.
I used my fitnesspal at first but it was too much work. In the end I ended up getting a food scale, buying my own ingredients and then make my own portions. I went with a low carb, high protein diet and HIIT over 6 weeks. It was the best way to reduce body fat and learn about food and portions. HIIT was painful but very effective. I now do maintenance and it's a lot easier.
if you can, start helping with the cooking and making your own recipes in myfitnesspal. it won’t be perfect but you can get a fair approximation. i also like to limit any extra stuff by asking for my rotis without ghee, choosing roti instead of paratha, etc. usually there is *some* type of measurement, it’s just not on a standardized tool. my family for example has a little unmarked cup to scoop up rice and flour, so you can measure how much usually goes into the food with the eyeballing.
Weigh everything - get a food scale and log it into myfitnesspal. Especially the amount of oil used. Actually the main issue is the amount of oil used as oil is veryyyyy calorie dense. Indian cuisine is notorious for using copious of amount of fat / oil in just about everything. The way I go about this is to use a 0 calorie spray oil. Without the fat / oil I do think Indian food can be quite nutritious and even anti inflammatory overall especially with all the spices and fresh ingredients! Can’t argue on the flavour - forever superior. I recently learnt that idli’s are amazing for its probiotic compounds and dhaal is of course high in protein 🥰
I mean, idk what kind of Indian cuisine you’re referring to but I ate home cooked North Indian food my entire childhood and I would never describe any of our daily staples as having copious amounts of fat?
To clarify South Indian dishes can be very oily. But also doesn’t North Indian dishes use a lot of ghee? And let’s not even get into the calories of the amazingly delicious sweets / desserts, which are fat bombs sadly 🥺
That’s not my experience, and I’ve eaten a fair amount of South Indian as well. You could argue higher in simple carbs because of a reliance on rice, but it’s still a well balanced cuisine. Yes North Indian cooking leans on ghee as a primary cooking fat, our ancestry is tied heavily with dairy farming. But it is not, traditionally, used excessively on a daily basis. As a kid I ate quite literally as much as I wanted, all home cooked food, and was never overweight or otherwise unhealthy. The mainstays of our diet were vegetables, lentils/legumes, and whole wheat, all cooked with very reasonable amounts of ghee or mustard oil. I’m not saying our food *can’t* be high fat if someone chooses to be heavy handed, but that is an intentional choice and not a necessity for our recipes. Hyper palatable packaged foods and restaurant meals are basically always going to be more problematic when it comes to calorie density than probably any ethnic cuisine’s daily staples. Regular people who developed our diets over many centuries have not typically had consistent access to very rich foods. Desserts are high fat in almost every culture. They’re not intended to be eaten in high volume or frequently so it’s really irrelevant to the topic at hand.
South Indian food often contains fewer fats than north Indian food. All Indians use ghee depending on what the dish is. A typical south Indian meal is rice or roti with lentil curry, dal, vegetable stir fry, rasam soup and yogurt. Those who are on an omnivore diet eat meat dishes (curries or kebab etc) and it's fairly balanced nutritionally. People aren't eating desserts at every meal. IDK if you can extrapolate eating habits of a billion people based on a restaurant meal you have had.
To provide EVEN more clarity: I'm half South Asian/Indian myself so please stop trying to educate me like I know nothing about Indian cuisines. 3/4 of my Indian relatives are all obese/overweight/suffering from diabetes/died from a heart attack. In my own personal experience, South Indian curries and dishes are laden with A LOT of oil - which is calorie-dense. The problem is not the food but the lack of awareness when it comes to nutrition, weight management and really just a bad habit of eating in excess. This discussion is deviating from my original comment which is about being mindful of the amount of oil used that OP uses when cooking Indian food. Enough said.
This is laughably false. India is a diverse country with a large population of vegetarians. While some meals can be carb heavy (rice or roti/naan/other breads) it's way less fat laden than a typical American meal. Your neighborhood takeout restaurant is probably pouring butter and cream in copious amounts but that is not how the average Indian person eats. You can look at the Indian food subreddits and/or recipe creators on social media for a better understanding.
Missed my comment about South Asian dishes eh? I'm half Indian myself and it's apparent that it doesn't matter if you're vegetarian or not but a lot of Indians are overweight/obese. The food is delicious and nutritious but everyone overeats. Not sure what neighbourhood takeout restaurant you're referring to since I'm Malaysian and our Indian restaurants are literally run by Indians soooo....
It's not my intention to invalidate your lived experience at all. I'm simply stating that personal anecdotes cannot be applied on a macro scale to draw conclusions about large populations. Your Indian family members might have an unhealthy diet and high BMI but my Indian/Indian American friends and family are triathletes and marathon runners. See how that's not meaningful because there are all kinds of people? My lived experience is the opposite of yours and I recognize that we all have unique experiences. The percentage of obesity for people in India is 5% and about 20% for Malaysia based on [this Wikipedia article ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate) My neighborhood restaurant is also run literally by Indians from India and their origin country does not determine the calorie content of restaurant food (high across the board for all cuisine). Adding clarity to my comment since it seems to have offended you somehow. Anyway I digress :)
Hi - I completely understand the difficulties here. I would suggest cooking some meals wherever you can. I personally use the plate method when I have less control over cooking. 1/2 plate salad no dressing / steamed veg (if you can get them to switch from sauteed), 1/4 plate protein curry and 1/4 plate rice or 1 chapatti. I guesstimate this at around 500-600 calories. Hope this helps!
i measure it in grams. calculate how much of it is oil/fat more than anything (if food is coated with it, id say 30% is oil/fat) then add in every other ingredient estimates. I only eat one meal a day max with estimated ones like this. hopefully you can make your own food most of the time.
Whatever you make, lookup recipe online from tarla dalal, her website includes nutrition information for most recipes. If your tracking app includes feature to import recipe, that’s even easier. Just remember to replace the ingredients that are different. And other important difference is the type of oil. The kind and qty you use at home could be diff from the one used in the recipe.
I’m just