How do you figure calories?

IceFaith

How do you figure calories in your own recipes? I saw something on here about a SparkPeople website but I don't understand it. How do I calculate ingredients and come up w/ the calorie, etc, count?

dtraylor

You might try nutritiondata.com. There is an analyze recipe function.
http://www.nutritiondata.com/mynd/myrecipes/welcome?returnto=/mynd/myrecipes

Good Luck!

amymeenieminymo

On the spark people website there is a recipe calculator, just enter each ingredient and how much of it (example 1 tablespoon of flour) and then when you're done say how many servings it makes, and it will give you the nutritional info for one serving. It's not always perfect because sometimes it hard to find the ingredient that matches the nutritional info of yours....so say you're making something with ground turkey that has 180 calories per 4 ounces, sometimes its hard to find one on there that has that exact calories....but its better than nothing and I find myself using it a lot for food that I make at home.

angel_eyes17

I put every ingredient in individually. Save it as a meal and divide it by servings. For example, I make spinach quiches. The recipe calls for 15 oz of ricotta, 2 eggs, 1 bag of spinach, etc. So I type in sargento ricotta, (the whole container) - add that in and so on. I save it as a meal. Then I usually cut the quiche in 6 pieces - 2 days dinner for myself, my husband and daughter. So I divide 1 meal by 6 which equals 0.166 of a meal. There might be a waaaaay easier way to do it and I hope you find it, but this is the only way I know how to do it.

xtina11179

I just checked out the SparkPeople website and I DO NOT like it at all. The database hardly has anything that I ate and it just isn't very user friendly. I am so glad I have MFP...otherwise I don't know that I'd be very successful at his weight loss thing!

And Angel_Eyes, that is usually how I do it too. Seems to work for me!

IceFaith

Xtina, I looked there and didn't like the way it was set up either. Much more difficult for me to use I felt.

Angel_eyes, I finally figured that all out...lol. It seemed like it shoulda clicked w/ me Much sooner than it did...oy.

Thanks everyone for your replies!

AmberMommyTo2G1B

I always portion it out before anyone else gets their food... I should probably do it how everyone else has said and put it into sparkpeople.com because it is so much easier that way and my food won't be cold by the time I'm ready to eat lol.