Bill Dawg's Journal: nutrition news you can't use

So my dog had bashed my knee earlier this year, so I'd suspended our long walks hiking the hilly streets in my area. So I got fatter.

I hadn't been concerned with weight before, so when the battery died in my bathroom scale, I never got around to buying a 9-volt battery to replace it.

Well I finally did, 4 weeks ago. Stepped on the scale, and oh shit, 189.

I looked at a calendar, and there just so happened to be 19 weeks left in the year. So that was my goal.

After some poking around the intertubes, I read that cutting about 3500 calories a week is supposed to get you to lose about a pound a week.

I also found some stuff about something called "BMR" (different from "BMI"). You plug stuff in to a BMR clackulator, and it spits out an estimate of how many calories you'd need to eat to maintain your current body weight (at your current level of exertion lifestyle).

So I figured I was eating about 2200 cals a day, and since I might slow down as I lose, I thought I ought to shoot for 1.5 lbs a week, so I'm eating a 750 calorie deficit, or trying to come as close to 1450 cals a day.

So I'm counting calories, and my sis pointed me to a myfitnesspal web site, which is pretty primitive, looking like it was build circa the 1990's, but people have entered the nutrition info for tons of foods, so that's mainly why I'm using it.

So mum is making her delicious chicken and rice casserole tonight, and invited me over for dinner. I looked up the 411 on the other ingredients, but the package of chicken thighs is craptastically unhelpful.

It said something like:
Serving size: 4oz
Calories per serving: 205 (or whatever)

Then the punchline:
Servings per container: Varied.

WTF?!? Obviously someone reading the label wants to know how many calories in one of their fucking chicken thighs! How about on average?!?

And (if I had nothing better to do) I could cut the meat off and weigh it before consuming it, but is that calorie count with or without the skin!?

Useless. How is that complying with a law to print nutrition info, by saying "varies". A 12oz fucking can of Coke says it has 140 cals. What if they were huge assholes and said something like "17 cals per 49 ml. (Good luck trying to do the math.) Servings per container: Whatever. (Ha ha, sucker.)"?

So unfortunately there's quite a bit of "letter of the law" compliance out there, making it hard.