One of the biggest overlooks when it comes to cooking dinners or any involved meal with multiple ingredients is accounting for the calories each ingredient will take. Let’s say you’re cooking pasta and you want to include the sauce, some seasonings, some things to mix with the pasta .etc
You’re done but you won’t know what each bowl of that finished pasta will be like per serving. That’s why you have to take into account, all of the calories of the ingredients. That tablespoon of vegetable oil you use, that’s 100 calories. The sauce you’re gonna use, that’s probably another 100. The pasta, 140 probably. It doesn’t work as if the calories are going to vanish by the time you’re finished cooking said meal. Each bowl you could have, could amount to over 500 at most, but you may not know it and it’s easy to overlook.
That’s why also, it looks like people pack on weight so easily when they’re down to just dinner meals to eat. They pile up fast.
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It’s actually a common problem that people go “Oh, I had some pasta, that’s 200 calories” but not paying attention to the 600 calories of sauce slathered all over it.
Same with salad. People go “Oh, I’ve got salad, 50 calories” but then the dressing is several hundred calories.
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It might not sound like a common problem among all the people saying “It’s not a problem for me!”, but it’s one of the big reasons that people’s calorie counting fails is people are blind to the calories added by things other than the main dish itself.
It’s well-established that underreporting of calories is a major issue in trying to help people lose weight: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12170-020-00652-6
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Just don’t use salad dressings. I personally always found them gross.