How to allow for home cooked meal calories

mw442

New here and so far after 3 weeks progressing well. One thing I am struggling with is what to allow for in calories for home cooked meals. My wife or I cook up a big batch of something (curry, casserole) with a good balance of meat and vegetables. We haven’t and can’t see ourselves counting each ingredient and then the portion we eat. Is there some rule of thumb we can use that is “close enough”?

lynn_glenmont

Are you aware of the recipe option on MFP? Weigh the total amounts of the ingredients, weigh the total amount of the finished cooked casserole, curry, etc., enter the total grams of the dish as the number of servings, and when you weigh your portion in grams, that's the number of servings you enter.

I can't really think of a "close enough" method that doesn't involve some kind of estimates that are just a less accurate way of accomplishing the same thing (e.g., "OK, there were 2 lbs of beef, and I think we're going to get three meals out of it, so for two of us that's six servings, so I'll say I had 1/3 pound of beef each time" -- ignoring whether you and your wife eat the same amount as each other -- "and there was a pound of potatoes, so I'll say I had 3 1/2 oz. of potatoes, and we used about a quarter cup of oil, that's four Tbsp, which is 12 tsp., so I'll say I had 2 tsp. of oil, and there was a can of tomatoes, so I'll figure one-sixth of the can of tomatoes...etc." -- frankly, for anything that makes multiple servings, like a casserole, stew, baked goods, to me it seems easier to enter the recipe, and weigh the total recipe, and weigh each portion as I have it.)

Are you weighing all your other food?

Edited to fix typo.

unigirl143

I use the recipe builder too. I find it helps a lot when my family and I can't decide what sounds good for our meal planning. I go down my list of recipes and find one we agree on. It helps with shopping lists too because the quantities are all listed and I will go and plan from what I have and what I need to get.

segacs

Restaurant meals are notoriously hard to calculate. But home cooked meals are easy.

Step 1: Invest in a food scale. (You can get one off Amazon for like $10. It's the best money you'll ever spend.)
Step 2: Weigh the ingredients in your recipe. Enter them into your recipe calculator.
Step 3: Now weigh the finished cooked recipe. Log the weight in grams of the finished recipe as the number of servings. For instance, let's say the finished recipe weighs 300g, then you log that the recipe makes 300 servings.
Step 4: Measure out how much of it you eat, and log that many servings. Say your portion is 150g. Log 150 servings.

Done and done.

VykkDraygoVPR

Use the recipe tool and add it that way. It's very useful. For example, I prepared a chili last night (crockpotted that sucker for 21 hours). I chopped and weighed everything, and noted it on a pad we keep in the kitchen just for that reason. Today, I just had to put it in the tool, then serve it up. My sister was able to do the same, since I wrote it down as I went.

If you want to be very exacting, then you can weigh the finished product to determine the calories per gram. I do this for things that last several meals (pasta sauce, for example). For my chili, it was only 800 calories for the pot, so I just halved it between us.

maidentl

I use the recipe builder as well. I mean yeah, it's not going to be spot on because you might get more meat in this serving or more noodles in that one. But I figure it's close enough.

ettaterrell

It takes time and want to, I put every recipe I cook in the recipe building (if you can find a recipe close to yours you can enter the web page and then change the ingredients to match your recipe, this makes it alot easier.) After you get your main recipes in you will use them again and alot easier to just click recipe and add the one you've ate for that day. I cook every day at dinner so i'm always putting recipes in and always using the ones i put in previously

MarcyKirkton

I often find similar dishes in the database.

nyponbell

I don't use the recipe option, but make a "meal" out of the ingredients. I basically weigh it before I put it in the pot and then divide the finished products up into five (or six) lunch boxes, trying to put an equal amount in each. Then I take the weighed ingredients, divide it by five (or six) and log that for the day. Since I make one large batch for just myself, even if it's not always accurate day-to-day, by the end of the week (I make mine for Monday-Friday lunch) I will have eaten the whole thing and it will be accurate.

I suppose it's different when there's two of you though. I'm not sure if the recipe option is easy to adapt, but I like using the meal option because I can change it depending on how much I put in of one ingredient the next time I use it (or if I add or remove something) and save it again quite easily.

segacs

MarcyKirkton wrote: »

I often find similar dishes in the database.

Careful with those: They're probably going to be extremely inaccurate. They've been added by members and you have absolutely no idea what went into them or whether the calories are in any way similar to yours.

I realize not everyone is as OCD as I am about trying to log and track accurately. But at some point, those entries aren't much better than putting your finger up to the wind and taking a wild guess. Far better to enter your frequent recipes into the calculator once, and then use those each time you make those recipes.

nyponbell wrote: »

I don't use the recipe option, but make a "meal" out of the ingredients.

I do that with some recipes where the ingredient quantities are likely to change each time I cook them. Stir-fry for example gets input as a "meal" instead of a recipe. Meals are easier to edit on the fly.

janejellyroll

MarcyKirkton wrote: »

I often find similar dishes in the database.

How do you know it's similiar? My husband uses up to 1/2 cup oil in his marinara. I use a tablespoon. If I choose "marinara" from the database, I have no idea if the person who created the entry using a method like mine or one that is closer to my husband's.

VeryKatie

segacs wrote: »

Restaurant meals are notoriously hard to calculate. But home cooked meals are easy.

Step 1: Invest in a food scale. (You can get one off Amazon for like $10. It's the best money you'll ever spend.)
Step 2: Weigh the ingredients in your recipe. Enter them into your recipe calculator.
Step 3: Now weigh the finished cooked recipe. Log the weight in grams of the finished recipe as the number of servings. For instance, let's say the finished recipe weighs 300g, then you log that the recipe makes 300 servings.
Step 4: Measure out how much of it you eat, and log that many servings. Say your portion is 150g. Log 150 servings.

Done and done.

Alternate step 3 would be to break it into single serve portions and just say it serves that many.

Eg. you added up the recipe to be 1200 calories total. Say it serves 4 - that's 300 each serving. If you eat that over the week, it's not such a big deal if one day is actually 250 and the next is 350 since it will balance out.

However, use the quoted step 3 if you're feeling a family or if it'll take you longer than a week to eat the leftovers.

Abby2205

I use recipe builder, but honestly I usually eyeball the number of servings in the finished dish. For example, if I make a casserole, I will serve up four equal portions to my family, then look in the dish and estimate how many more servings of the same size are left, and make that my total number of servings in my recipe. Sometimes I will do a quick portioning in the dish (cutting lasagna into serving size squares, for example). Then if I take seconds or eat leftovers, I mentally determine whether I'm having another full serving, or half or whatever.
For a pasta mixed with sauce in a serving bowl recipe, I know that if I use 450 g of pasta that will result in five servings.

cbelc2

I put that recipe in MFP. That's one reason I chose this app. So when I make my roasted chicken curry with veggies I just pull up my recipes and there it is!

mw442

Thanks everyone for their posts. Seems I need to give recipe builder a try. Seems my guesstimates are not far off as another kg bit the dust last week!!

segacs

mw442 wrote: »

Thanks everyone for their posts. Seems I need to give recipe builder a try. Seems my guesstimates are not far off as another kg bit the dust last week!!

The truth is that most people can lose weight without logging all that accurately, at first. Just by tracking and watching what you eat, you're probably making big changes in your routine, and the pounds should start to come off from that alone. Even if you're off by a couple hundred calories here or there, you're still eating at a pretty big deficit, so it doesn't matter all that much.

Most people hit a wall at some point though where they feel like they've plateaued. Usually what's happened is that the deficits have gotten smaller as the weight has come off, and the logging inaccuracy simply caught up to them.

That's when they'll go out and buy a food scale and start logging everything more carefully. And discovering -- much to their surprise -- that they were off by a significant amount. Then they'll tighten up their logging and start losing again.

It's never going to be 100% accurate. It's not an exact science. But if you have better data, you can make better decisions.

cmtigger

I also use the recipe builder. I then delete it when I've eaten up all the leftovers, unless it's something I always make the same way.

AmyRhubarb

Recipe builder is the bomb. Takes a few minutes to enter everything, but once it's done, it's in there for future use. I use it all the time - and easy to edit if it's a recipe that I change up ingredients on, I can change quantities or specific ingredients easily.

knelson095

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

Are you aware of the recipe option on MFP? Weigh the total amounts of the ingredients, weigh the total amount of the finished cooked casserole, curry, etc., enter the total grams of the dish as the number of servings, and when you weigh your portion in grams, that's the number of servings you enter.

I feel really dumb that I didn't figure this out myself. I've been adding several steps to get to the same thing. I never thought to just put the grams as servings...I'm so glad I saw this!!!

amoment

I cook a lot off allrecipes as a lot of their recipes have been uploaded on here and can be searched too.