I'm confused about how to calculate calories for my portions

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tsims25
tsims25 Posts: 9 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've been doing a lot of cooking lately. I made some chocolate chip cookies and a taco salad from a recipe website. While I understand how to make the recipe with measurements such as tablespoon, teaspoon, cup, etc, I'm really confused on how to calculate the portion that I'm eating and logging it into MyFitnessPal. For example, I consumed 2 cups of taco salad. So how many calories is that? Maybe I'm not as familiar with the app as I just started using it again but any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,565 Member
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    Enter the ingredients into the recipe builder and figure out how many total cups the salad contained. The best thing to do is purchase a food scale, weigh the ingredients you put in, and weigh the final result. Then you can make a serving either 1 or 100 grams and weigh out exactly what you are eating.
  • orangegato
    orangegato Posts: 6,570 Member
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    I usually calculate the entire recipe for calories and weigh the final product in grams on my scale. Then see the weight deficit after eating and figure out calories based on weight.
  • CTcutie
    CTcutie Posts: 649 Member
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    Exactly what ⬆️ they said... basically you need to weigh every ingredient as you are making something, whether you use a recipe or make a sandwich. It's a pain at first, but it's WELL worth the effort & it gets easier & faster the more you do it (foods are saved in the diary).
    Using measuring cups & spoons are only helpful when using a recipe- otherwise you should use a food scale :smile:
  • mail2dijaw
    mail2dijaw Posts: 36 Member
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    CTcutie wrote: »
    Exactly what ⬆️ they said... basically you need to weigh every ingredient as you are making something, whether you use a recipe or make a sandwich. It's a pain at first, but it's WELL worth the effort & it gets easier & faster the more you do it (foods are saved in the diary).
    Using measuring cups & spoons are only helpful when using a recipe- otherwise you should use a food scale :smile:

    Absolutely and maintain and little notebook where you note down the dish name and weight/calories of each items. add up the total calorie and divide by number of portion you wish to make. It will be very hard to achieve exact calorie but approximate will be closer to exact atleast. Best part is you will know how much you consume in each portion

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