How do you figure out how many calories are in a home made meal?

kgbbunny

I'm new to MFP and ran into a bit of a hurdle. How do I measure the calorie and nutrition count of a meal that has lots of ingredients and that is not being eaten by myself. For example I am making veggie chili with 2 cans of red beans, 1 can of stewed tomatoes, 1 can of corn and some onion. I can scan the barcode of the cans I used, but how do I figure out how many calories are in the portion I am eating?

Tblackdogs

Go to recipes. Add manually. Tell it how many servings you want it to be. Then let it calculate. Works great!

lots2live4

Under the food tab, click on recipes, then click on Add a meal manually. Type an ingredient, click return to go to the next line, and another ingredient. When you finish adding all ingredients. Click on match ingredients and it will try to match or you can replace what it finds. Hope this helps.

NoelFigart1

Weigh the ingredients in the total recipe. Combine. Weigh the recipe. Divide by the number of servings you want the whole recipe to be, then weigh out your portion.

Yes, it is a pain in the *kitten*. I did it today for shepherd's pie.

lemurcat12

Step one: Use the recipe builder to create a recipe (I like the old version of the recipe builder). Add in all your ingredients and the total amount you used. That will give you the calorie count for the whole thing and ask you how many servings there are.

Step two: Weigh the whole thing and decide how many servings there are. Pick a number that makes a serving equal to an even-to-use number such as 1 oz or 100 grams.

Step three: Measure out an amount for yourself and log it.

To illustrate:

Pot of chili is 1290 grams.

To make it easy, decide that 1 serving is 100 grams, so there are 12.9 servings. Select that number.

Then, measure out your portion. Say it's 224 grams. Log 2.24 servings.

_Terrapin_

NoelFigart1 wrote: »

Weigh the ingredients in the total recipe. Combine. Weigh the recipe. Divide by the number of servings you want the whole recipe to be, then weigh out your portion.

Yes, it is a pain in the *kitten*. I did it today for shepherd's pie.

Yes, but it is a PITA one time. Once you have it, just keep using it

diegops1

Add up the calories, protein, carbs, fat, fiber, etc. Measure the finished product in cups or ounces if you have a scale. Measure out 1 serving using the same measurement and divide that number into the total. For example, my veggie chili usually comes to 8 cups each time I make it. The ingredients total about 1200 calories. So dividing 8 into 1200 yields 150 calories per cup. I usually eat 2 cups at a meal, so that is 300 calories for the meal. Depending on the type of beans I use I get between 9 and 13 grams of protein per cup. Do the same for all the rest of the things you are interested in.

NoelFigart1

_Terrapin_ wrote: »

NoelFigart1 wrote: »

Weigh the ingredients in the total recipe. Combine. Weigh the recipe. Divide by the number of servings you want the whole recipe to be, then weigh out your portion.

Yes, it is a pain in the *kitten*. I did it today for shepherd's pie.

Yes, but it is a PITA one time. Once you have it, just keep using it

But, but, but....

I am an artiste, my dear. I never make a meal the same way twice.

lemurcat12

In the alternative, if you are making something with a relatively small number of servings or discrete components you don't have to build a recipe. If I do a smaller stew I might calculate the total calories and then if I have 1/4 of it I would divide everything by 4 and simply log all the ingredients. Not perfect, but it works okay for me. More often than that, I log my home cooked meals by just logging components: my piece of meat, my portion of the potatoes (there I do the weigh the total before cooking and then divide based on the portion I take), my portion of the veggies, my measured out blueberries, whatever.

meganljohnson06

I've done it manually on MFP and I've used this site: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

kgbbunny

I scanned all the ingredients into the recipe and tried to save it, but it said it was unable to save the recipe.

edit: I figured out it was because i changed my password and needed to relog into the app. Thanks to everyone for the help