You did the careful version. You put the chicken on the scale, got six ounces, searched the database, picked the first entry that said chicken thigh, and logged it. That's more effort than most people put into a lunch.
Whether the number you got is right depends on one word in the entry name that you probably didn't read: raw.
Raw entries are everywhere in food databases, because raw is how meat gets measured and sold. Most of the meat people actually weigh is sitting on a plate, cooked. Put those two together and you get one of the quietest errors in tracking: every serving comes out short, by the same amount every time, and nothing about the day looks wrong.
Cooking takes water out
A piece of meat loses a good share of its weight in the pan, and most of what leaves is water. So the meat that comes out is denser than the piece that went in, and every cooked ounce carries more than a raw ounce did.
Here's the thigh, both ways, from the USDA database:
- 6 oz raw (chicken thigh, meat only, raw): 206 calories · 7g fat · 0g carbs · 33g protein
- 6 oz roasted (chicken thigh, meat only, roasted): 304 calories · 14g fat · 0g carbs · 42g protein
Same cut, same six ounces on the scale. The roasted figure is almost half as much again.
Don't try to run those two rows backwards to the gram. They're separate samples, measured on different birds, so they won't reconcile exactly — a cooked piece can't really gain fat in the oven, and the rows disagree on that point. What they agree on is the direction and roughly the size: the same weight of meat is a good deal more food once it's cooked, because six raw ounces cook down to something nearer four.
Which way the mistake goes
There are two ways to mismatch them, and they don't cost the same.
Cooked weight, raw entry. You weighed what was on your plate and logged it against the raw figure. That's the common one, and it undercounts: 206 calories logged for 304 eaten, about a third light, and 9g of protein missing with it. On a food you eat most days, that's about a hundred calories a serving that never reach the record.
Raw weight, cooked entry. You weighed the pack before it went in the oven and then picked a cooked entry. That overcounts, by nearly half. It's rarer, because people who weigh raw tend to know they're doing it, but it's the reason the fix can't be "always pick the cooked one."
The rule is just that the entry has to match the state you weighed it in. Neither state is more correct than the other.
A few rules that cover most of it
Meat, fish and eggs on your plate: cooked. If you weighed it after cooking, look for cooked in the entry name, and the method too if the database has it — roasted, grilled and pan-browned aren't identical, though they're far closer to each other than any of them is to raw.
A pack you're cooking for several people: weigh it raw. Weigh the whole pack before it goes in, log your share of the raw weight against a raw entry. That's usually easier than weighing a cooked portion, and it's the one case where raw is the natural answer.
Rice and pasta: it depends how you measured. A cup is almost always a cooked cup — a cup of cooked white rice is 205 calories. Grams off the packet are almost always dry, and the nutrition panel on the bag is usually per dry weight too. A dry cup of rice is the rice before it's absorbed its water, and it carries several times the calories of a cooked one. Neither is wrong. Mixing them is.
If you're not sure, say which you meant. A log that says assumed cooked can be fixed later if it turns out it wasn't. A log that just says chicken thigh, 6 oz can't, because nobody will remember which it was.
What Graham does with this
When you tell Graham you had six ounces of chicken, he treats it as cooked unless you say raw. That's a deliberate default rather than a guess. A weight someone mentions about food they just ate is almost always what was on the plate, so that's the reading that's right most often.
It came out of a real miss. On a test run he logged six ounces of grilled chicken at the raw figures, about a third light, and nothing in the reply gave it away. The fix now sits in his instructions, and there's a test that checks it both ways: six ounces of chicken has to come out at the cooked figure, and six ounces, but that was the raw weight has to come out at the raw one. Testing both directions matters because the lazy fix would have been to always reach for the bigger number, which is just the other mistake.
What he doesn't do is ask raw or cooked every time you mention meat. Most of the time the answer is obvious, and a question on every chicken breast is exactly the kind of homework that makes people stop logging. When it genuinely is ambiguous and the difference matters, he logs the cooked reading and tells you that's what he assumed, so you can correct it in one message if he's wrong.
Either way, the word you didn't read in the database is now in the log where you can see it.
— Ryan