Estimating Calories of Foods You Didn't Prepare

marshmallowhunter

It's easy to estimate calories when you prepared the food from scratch yourself, or when the food came out of a box with the number right on the label.

But how about in less certain circumstances? I have lots of trouble guessing, because I don't have much intuition as to how much is how much.

For example, my mum brought over some spaghetti sauce, which I am warming up right now. I have no idea what the exact composition is, so I have no idea how many calories are in a serving. I mean, I can tell that it's main ingredients are ground beef and crushed tomato, and I can see some carrot bits in there and stuff like that, but I'm not really sure how much of those things are in it, or what other things are in it.

At least in this case, I could assume that it's mostly made out of it's most calorie-dense ingredient, measure my portion size, and go off of that. It's even harder to estimate for foods I can't measure, though. For example, when I buy lunch instead of making it. A lot of smaller establishments don't have websites where I can look at the nutritional data. And when food comes on trays or in containers that don't quite resemble domestic dinner plates, and food is piled in such a way that you can't see everything you're eating at once (think of Chinese fast food at food courts), it's difficult for me to eyeball portions. I have no idea what X grams of ginger beef is supposed to look like, or X ounces of chow mein noodle. Even if I did know how many grams of ginger beef I have, I don't know what the beef-to-batter ratio is.

And then there are foods that are even harder to distinguish the constituent parts of. If you're ordering pizza from a place that isn't a large chain with nutritive info on a website, how do you know how many calories a pizza is when you don't know how much sauce, cheese, pepperoni, etc. are on a slice? How about drinks that come in "small," "medium," or "large," but don't say how many milliliters are in a small, medium, or large?

I know the best answer is probably, "if you mostly eat home-cooked meals, and don't eat out too often, then miscalculating calories when you do eat out shouldn't be too big of a concern, as you should be eating right most of the time anyway, and dining out should be a rare treat." Good in theory, but hard in practice when you're a working student. I barely at out once a month before I moved out. These days, I'm lucky if I cook once a week.

Any suggestions? What are your strategies for estimating calories in foods without clear information?

sunburntgalaxy

I usually try looking at a lot of similar items in the database, and then I try to pick one that sounds fairly similar and try to pick one with a somewhat high calorie amount to be safe. I would rather be overestimating the calories in something then underestimating. But mostly in cases where I really am not sure it is just a blind guess and I try to be as close as possible the rest of the time that week to be sure I am not going over (or at least not too far over).