Rule of Thumb: Meat Prep

This is a new feature I'm calling "Rule of Thumb" and its purpose should be self-evident. It's worth will range from indispensable to good-to-know. This one falls in between for most of you, I think.

It was inspired by a Patron who asked me for values pertaining to chicken in Whole Goddamn Chicken.

Meat, Prep and Calories

I've talked about the importance of logging your meats right in The Leangains Method. This is about the importance of knowing the values for its preparation. Because many moons ago, not knowing cost me an extra 500 calories a day and essentially nullified progress for a whole month of dieting. This is what I wish I would've paid attention to.

All lean meats fall within the same 120 kcal range as discussed in the book. But the 100 grams you bought doesn't mean you're eating 100 grams of meat. This is due to the cooking losses that occur during preparation. Lightly fried meat, which I'd wager is how most of us eat it, causes some water loss. Doesn't matter. But it matters when you're logging meats that aren't done that way.

So in the case of the 600 g white chicken meat mentioned in WGC, you need to apply a modifier to the value for raw chicken fillet/breast - and these values goes for any meat that isn't prepped the usual way.

Meat Prep Modifiers

Roast: +15%

Sous-Vide: +25%

Grilled +35% 

Explanation

Since all lean meat is fairly homogenous in macronutrient composition it might befuddle some why prawns are 60 kcal, cheap chicken fillets 80 kcal, and a grilled chicken breast 135-150 kcal.

That doesn’t make sense until we consider that prawns are half water, half meat. That’s why they’re so low in calories. You get 50 g in a 100 g-package. 

Roasting, grilling or sous-vide drains most of the water and increases caloric density accordingly. As does cooking it, say frying it in butter like I like to do, but far less than the aforementioned methods. 

That’s why you should weigh your meat raw, before preparation of any kind. The cooked product isn’t the 100 g you put in the pan, but the values are the same, it’s just a difference of caloric density. 

Cheap-ass chicken might be 20% off on price, but it’s more water as well. I've seen values listed as 80 kcal which means they injected 20% extra water. Standard is 10% and this and the aforementioned applies to frozen product.  

On the other extreme, grilling meat drains *all* the water and adds +35%  to the raw value and that's on the low end. 50% is at the other end - but no deli that cares about repeat customers would go there because it doesn't taste very good. 

So how many calories does roasted white chicken meat contain? Raw values fall in the range of 100-110 kcal so 105 x 1.15 = 121 for white meat and 725 kcal for 600 grams of it.