Calculate calories in home made dishes

BullyMamma

Hi. Bully Momma here.
Do any of you know how to calculate calories in home made dishes? For example, when creating a recipe on the recipe page, after adding ingredients, how do you figure out calories & nutritional value? Whats happening to me is, after adding ingredients, it will appear on my food diary that I ate the entire stock pot of soup myself. Am I making any sense?

joflo723

Up in the top right corner, you select how many portions your recipe makes. That way when you enter "1 serving" it will log the amount you ate. Alternatively, if your recipe makes 4 portions, you could just log that you ate 0.25 of it. Same diff.

BullyMamma

Thanks. I will try again! So since its a made up recipe, I need to figure out on my own how many servings my recipe serves? Then will it figure out the calories & nutritional values on its own?

joflo723

Yep...you got it!

mildammm

Yup, easiest way is to weigh the entire pot and then weigh individual portions of it. Don't eyeball 10 servings when it only makes 6.

sammama5

I'm having issues with it today. I can't alter any of my previously entered recipes. Not everybody gets their recipes from a website, so I don't fit with most other MFP users, I guess. I hope it works for you!

merisaOct3

@BullyMomma - yeah. The best advice I've seen is that you weigh your pot/pan before you cook in it. Then weigh the total recipe in the pan, subtract the weight of the pan itself (essentially a manual tare). Then you can divide the total weight of the recipe by the number of servings you'd like to portion out. It's a pain, and I'm often not exact with it, but it's close. Since there're just two of us at home, I portion out leftovers into single servings. Makes for an easy lunch.

tomartist3

if you weigh your food, then weigh the total amount and put that as servings. then weigh your portions when you eat it and type the amount in grams(or what ever unit you use) as the amount of portions.

BullyMamma

This is awesome guys! The majority of my dishes are home made. Some things I can figure out the values. But have never figured out to calculate this when making soup or chile type dishes. I'm excited & am going to see if I can get it right with all these tips! Now.....do any of you know how to cure the Fitness Pal Yo Yo member..... haha

margelizard

I like to make a pot of something then immediately portion it into all my dishes. So, say I make a pot of soup, I'll usually dish my hubby and I's portion, then distribute the rest into different containers. Then I just make a note of the number of servings that way.

I suppose it's not quite so exact, but it works well for me. Plus, the more often I make a dish, the more often I remember how many portions I get from the whole batch. So then I don't have to keep checking my recipe!

taryninoly

oh I didn't even realize that option! I just always guess with the choices that come up - I set my daily calorie intake lower because I know that I am eating more calories than mfp states...

BullyMamma

Oh WOW! So I did it (not sure if correct) & the calories were not an issue, but the SODIUM! Off the charts! What a wake up call. Not sure how much sodium I'm really taking in. But this says one serving has over 2000 g sodium.

BullyMamma

And I haven't even add the fried tortilla strips yet! Yikes.

levicrouch

For an advanced version of this, you could create a new food where you have calculated out the calories (and nutrients) per gram for the recipe and then just weigh out how much you serve yourself.

Example (the values and weights are arbitrary).
Quesadilla:
Flour tortilla (40g)
--Calories: 130
--Fat: 1g
--Protein: 4g
--Carbs 30g
Cheese (28g):
--Calories: 110
--Fat: 8g
--Protein: 8g
--Carbs: 2g

So, from the example above we have a new food:
Quesadilla (68g)
--Calories: 240
--Fat: 9g
--Protein: 12g
--Carbs: 32g

To get the values of the new food we simply add all values of all ingredients and the weight.

MFP does this automatically, but the new food nutrient breakdown per 1 gram total weight is:
Quesadilla (1g)
--Calories: 3.53
--Fat: .132
--Protein: .176
--Carbs: .471

How is this beneficial? You can now cook up a quesadilla, portion it out, weigh it and have a more accurate measurement.

Say i prepare 3 Quesadilla's as above for the family. I portion myself out 97g of the final product. MFP uses a 1g counter for foods measured in grams.


Calculated out, I consume:
Quesadilla (97g)
--Calories: 342
--Fat: 13g
--Protein: 17g
--Carbs: 46g


Full disclosure: It doesn't make much sense to go through that effort for a quesadilla, but for something like a more complex recipe with many ingredients (like a soup or baked dish) the time invested up front will help make it easier to calculate the calories and nutrients later on

BullyMamma

Thank for the response & the examples to go along with it. Its making more sense to me.