How to count calories in home made food

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  • ncfitbit
    ncfitbit Posts: 1,058 Member
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    Hmm, I see no one else mentioned this, so I will add that recipe builder is really helpful when you're importing a recipe from the web. I'm surprised at how easily it will grab a recipe from just about any website even when it seems like the recipe is embedded in a fair amount of other text. I don't know how they do that!

    There's a bit of a learning curve because you will have to tweak the ingredient list a bit before it will accept all the ingredients (like take out any directions "rough chopped" ) but after you figure that out, it's pretty helpful.

  • JeromeBarry1
    JeromeBarry1 Posts: 10,182 Member
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    Today's lunch was a bunch of stuff thrown together in a pot. The trick was to identify the serving size. For that I added up all the grams of all the stuff I threw in the pot, and since I added 2 cups of water I used www.convertunits.com to convert cups to grams. Then I could add up all my grams and see how many total grams I had thrown into the pot. That total was the number of servings and a serving is equal to 1 gram, which had zero calories, BTW. When it came time to eat, I put my empty plate on my scale, zeroed the scale by pressing the "tare" switch, then piled a mess of food onto my plate. That was 350 grams, and I logged 350 servings.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,777 Member
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    JeromeBarry1 wrote: »
    Today's lunch was a bunch of stuff thrown together in a pot. The trick was to identify the serving size. For that I added up all the grams of all the stuff I threw in the pot, and since I added 2 cups of water I used www.convertunits.com to convert cups to grams. Then I could add up all my grams and see how many total grams I had thrown into the pot. That total was the number of servings and a serving is equal to 1 gram, which had zero calories, BTW. When it came time to eat, I put my empty plate on my scale, zeroed the scale by pressing the "tare" switch, then piled a mess of food onto my plate. That was 350 grams, and I logged 350 servings.

    how do you account for evaporation?
  • n1tp1cky
    n1tp1cky Posts: 3 Member
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    I too mostly eat homemade food. Where is this Recipe Builder? The thought of all that weighing and counting and entering makes me want to just give up on it and make up the calorie counts. I barely have time to shop & make the food, not do all this metawork! Help!
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,874 Member
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    Recipe builder...
  • Calliope610
    Calliope610 Posts: 3,771 Member
    edited October 2017
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    AnnPT77 wrote: »

    If it's a dish I make often, even with slight variations or different proportions, I'd put it in MFP as a saved meal. When you copy the saved meal into your diary, it copies in the ingredients/quantities individually, then you can edit them for different amounts of things, or delete/add some, right on your diary page.

    This. I eat salads for lunch or dinner several times a week. I have a saved meal named "basic salad" with all the variations of salad ingredients I routinely use - lettuce, spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, also cheese, chickpeas, black beans. The only thing I don't include in that saved meal is my protein source (grilled chicken, tuna, etc) and the dressing.

    So as I put my salad together, I weigh out the ingredients as I dump them into my salad bowl and jot down the weights on a little pad of paper I keep near my prep area. Then log my meal, deleting the items I didn't add and adjusting the weight quantities as needed. And because I keep that note pad and pen handy at food prep time, I don't have to have my phone at hand. I have all the info necessary to accurately log my meal later.

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