How do I calculate nutrition in home cooked meals

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muttersmad
muttersmad Posts: 9 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I'm trying to start losing weight after gaining sixty pounds, and I'm confused on how to calculate and logthex meals that I cook at home. Does anyone have any advice?

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  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
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    use the recipe builder
  • Lovee_Dove7
    Lovee_Dove7 Posts: 742 Member
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    Use of a food scale, weigh in grams.
    Also....practice. At first it may feel cumbersome, until you figure out how to keep things simple and do-able.
  • juggernaut1974
    juggernaut1974 Posts: 6,212 Member
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    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    use the recipe builder

    Yep...your home cooked meal is the sum of all the ingredients.
  • ModernRock
    ModernRock Posts: 372 Member
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    muttersmad wrote: »
    .......I'm confused on how to calculate and logthex meals that I cook at home......

    Also, don't trust the nutrition facts often published alongside cookbook recipes, and be especially suspicious if they aren't showing the ingredients by weight (i.e., grams or ounces).
  • ultrahoon
    ultrahoon Posts: 467 Member
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    Add the individual items you are using to a blank meal slot, with the weights of those items. Click quick tools > remember meal and give it a name.

    I find this superior to the recipe builder because it's easier to change the quantities of the food items in them.
  • muttersmad
    muttersmad Posts: 9 Member
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    Thank you all so much.
  • muttersmad
    muttersmad Posts: 9 Member
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    I don't use cookbooks, but thanks for the tip!
    ModernRock wrote: »
    muttersmad wrote: »
    .......I'm confused on how to calculate and logthex meals that I cook at home......

    Also, don't trust the nutrition facts often published alongside cookbook recipes, and be especially suspicious if they aren't showing the ingredients by weight (i.e., grams or ounces).

  • shaumom
    shaumom Posts: 1,003 Member
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    A convenient tool for adding up all the calories that I've used is this site: http://nutritiondata.self.com

    If you have a free account, when you make a recipe, along with the text based recipe, there is a place you can add in a list of all the ingredients and the site will add up all the nutrition for you.
  • ModernRock
    ModernRock Posts: 372 Member
    edited December 2015
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    Also, a food scale is nearly essential. So, for something like a salad, put the bowl on the scale and zero it out after each ingredient. I write jt all down and enter it later in the evening. Once you have everything weighed (total) decide your serving size. So, let's say you have something that weighs 800 grams and you decide 4 servings. MFP will divide the nutrition into 4. You just need to measure out 4 200 gram servings and select how many servings you'll be eating.. I'll make something like lasagne on the weekend and divide the leftovers into single serving size containers. It's a bit of work up front, but pretty awesome during the week to have pre-measured meals ready to log and eat.
  • angerelle
    angerelle Posts: 175 Member
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    I think it's easier to put the number of grammes as your servings, so in the example above, put 800 as the number of servings, then just weigh your portion - if you have 150g then that's 150 servings.
  • muttersmad
    muttersmad Posts: 9 Member
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    Awesome! Thanks
    shaumom wrote: »
    A convenient tool for adding up all the calories that I've used is this site: http://nutritiondata.self.com

    If you have a free account, when you make a recipe, along with the text based recipe, there is a place you can add in a list of all the ingredients and the site will add up all the nutrition for you.

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