I've heard that people can weigh their meal and it would say how much calories does that meal hold, is that true?
If it's not then what other way can I know how many calories does my meal hold?
Thanks

I don't know of any such device. To know the calories in a meal you need to figure each item. There are many calorie counting books on the market as well as online. I use The Calorie Fat and Carbohydrate Counter, by the Calorie King. It is approximateky pocket book size or a little smaller,besides calorie counts you can get calorie counts for restaurants, fast food and ethnic food, plus a lot of other information. I carry it with me and can use it anytime, I do not need to be online. Others prefer online calorie counters and their are several.

I measure parts of my meal - for my lunch I weighed the chicken, measured the rice and measured the cauliflower. Sometimes I'll measure some oil to pour over it (a teaspoon or so.)

There isn't some magic Jetson-type machine (maybe in a lab somewhere) where you pile a plate up, push a button and get a "this meal has 897 calories" thing.

The weight of the food isn't correlated with the amount of calories it contains. You have to look up each food via online calorie counters (like fitday.com) if it is something that doesn't have a calorie count on the label.

There *are* scales that will tell you, but you have to measure each type of food separately. For example, if you have grilled chicken on rice, you can weigh on the scale (and input rice), write that down, then put the chicken on and input chicken, then add the two together.

If I throw an orange on my scale, and type in 'orange', it will tell me the calories of it. But I can't put down "chili" or "soup". It has to be very specific.

I have a kitchen scale that does that but as someone above me said, you have to weigh each element on it's own. It's handy to have.

The only way to truly know the calories in the food would be to measure it with a bomb calorimeter. But there's nothing left after that process, so it kinda defeats the purpose.

Your best bet is to weight each element and figure them out using charts, etc. Even then it's basically a guesstimation of the actual calories, but it's definitely better than nothing!