question about counting calories

[Guest guest]

I'm just starting a CRON lifestyle -- changing my eating habits

without having yet started to count or restrict calories. I'm

wondering if anyone has any suggestions for easy ways to count

calories. Most of Walford's recipes involve many ingredients, making

calorie counting difficult. For instance, I'm tearing off big hunks

of Romaine lettuce, red cabbage, spinach, etc to put in my salads,

but I really don't know what quantities of each of these I'm using. I

would think a " cup of chopped such-and-such " could vary in mass

depending on how compacted the chopped up hunks are. Do I need a

scale to measure quantities by mass for this purpose?

Do any of you try to use the exact ingredients and quantities in the

recipes so that you can simply use the calorie count listed in the

book for that dish? Do you prepare simpler dishes with fewere

ingredients so that calorie counting is easier? Or do you just resign

yourself to many complex calculations?

Right now I'm primarily just trying to get an approximate idea of how

many calories per day I currently consume -- how many calories of the

new, healthy, CRON food I need in order to maintain my current weight.

Thanks in advance