Frustrated and overwhelmed calculating calories for homemade meals

e_v_v

I tend to cook a lot of meals that follow a recipe. On MFP, I typically add the recipe to "My Foods" and then divide the total calories by how many servings. I'm just overwhelmed by this process, needing to add in ingredients and then estimating the number of servings per recipe and the actual serving size. It is very time consuming, and don't even get me started about when the dish is not prepared by me (friend, non-chain restaurant, etc.)

Anyone have advice for doing this? How do you log homemade recipes and meals accurately without taking 23 of your 24 hours of the day doing it?

Azercord

My wife and I have a lot of homemade dishes in on database and at first it was very annoying to plug everything in but after while we started catching up to our regulars so it became a minor tweak here and there with a full input ever so often. I would recommend setting everything up as a recipe because it is easier to see what you did/used and easier to change.

We also weight out everything so we do many of our foods by weight now so the "serving" is just oz so minor changes in weight due to little things (evaporation, little more/less veg) just get caught in the serving amount and we don't actually have to change the recipe.

At first the input is time consuming but once you get your main meals in there (we are around 50 ish) things get a lot easier.

cwolfman13

Use the recipe builder...then you just have to build the recipe once and you can add it whenever you make it without going through the process of entering all of the ingredients.

ETA: you can also import recipes from various websites into the recipe builder and it'll just pull everything in...just make sure you go through and make edits as necessary because it will sometimes pull in weird stuff.

PikaJoyJoy

cwolfman13 wrote: »

Use the recipe builder...then you just have to build the recipe once and you can add it whenever you make it without going through the process of entering all of the ingredients.

^This. It might seem like a lot of effort but you'd be surprised how easy it is to just input as you go along. Or you can just write down each of the ingredients and the amounts you use along the way and enter it all at once later on.

Once it is in there, it's just a matter of adjusting the measurements next time you make the dish if there are any changes. Or at least you have a good entry idea if you decide to get lazy and not adjust any changes the next time.

The effort only takes an extra few minutes (1-4 min depending on how many items you're putting in and your connection speed). It's a pretty minuscule effort.

lmmbjb

The recipe building is phenomenal! It saves me tons of time. You can also upload recipes directly from the internet to help with this. I have found recipes very similar to my own and copy the URL, paste into the recipe building and it does all the work for you. You can also adapt or change the ingredients that are downloaded. Say you are able to use less oil or need to change all purpose flour to rice flour, very easy to do! It even calculates by the number of servings.

try2again

Yes to the recipe builder. Worst part of it is that you can't look up individual recipes, so if you don't have a dish for a while, it's a major pain to hunt it down.

As far as portioning, I weigh the finished product (minus the weight of the pan/dish, which I keep a list of on my fridge) and divide by the # of servings. I know others just work out the calories per gram and use the gram weight as their serving size.

allaboutthecake

Suggestion for meatloaf, casseroles, lasagnas, etc, 1-dish items, etc.: use the recipe builder, enter ALL the ingredients weight raw. (the only one I enter in cooked is bacon...if I precooked.. cuz its so fatty.) Weigh the dish/container empty before adding any ingredients. Cook the food in the dish. Weigh the dish AFTER its cooked/baked. Subtract the dish's weight itself. Enter "total number of servings" as the total ounces the cooked food is.
In your title in the recipe builder, you may even want to put in the total dish weight (such as meatloaf, 45oz baked weight).
For repeated recipes used later, go in and make minor adjustments.
It sounds like a pain, and honestly those first few recipes you are doing IS a pain! But, it goes fast as you use the recipe builder on a regular basis, I promise.
I use the recipe for many many things even fully baked/frosted/decorated cakes and other desserts. Weighing the total finished recipe. Then when I want to nibble, its easier to weigh my bites.

hth

(btw, when the hubs is cooking, he weighs it all out, writes it down for me, then I do the final weighing of the cooked product. If on occasion a friend is doing the cooking, then you you will get a feel for what that 'tuna noodle casserole' calories are going to be like because you have experience in doing your own nutritional value from your own recipes.)

try2again

Also, you should definitely try the function that allows you to import a recipe from a url- awesome! But in either case, you are VERY likely to get inaccurate/bogus returns on some of the entries (every time a recipe calls for olive oil, it gives me chicken breast cooked in olive oil), so be sure to look things over carefully & make sure they match what you're actually using.

RodaRose

If you use recipes from MFP recipe blog, you can click on the "log it" button.
http://blog.myfitnesspal.com/category/nutrition/recipes/

RodaRose

Or use the recipie feature:

Need2Exerc1se

I have no suggestions, only empathy. I had the same problem. All I got were people telling me it wasn't a problem for me because it wasn't a problem for them.

CTcutie

I learned to cook simpler meals, honestly. I still make casseroles, lasagna, etc. but focus on simple things that taste good/higher quality food. (This took me a long time to get to from eating frozen meals/fast food/eating with abandon!)
Importing URLs does make it faster, but you still need to double-check the entries), and I personally don't eat out nearly as often. It doesn't mean you can never eat out- you just need to figure out your own comfort level with guessing vs common sense in choosing better options vs the results you are getting.

IdLikeToLoseItLoseIt

I get frustrated and overwhelmed, too! I'm also a slow, lousy cook to begin with, so cooking already feels like a chore, let alone weighing every ingredient.

My only advice is to try the recipe builder and start with something that doesn't have a large number of ingredients. I weigh things as I go and write it down on paper, then enter the recipe in my phone after I'm done. If you're using any ingredients with bar codes (e.g., canned tomatoes), set those to the side so that you can use the barcode scanner as you enter the ingredients. If you're using the website, it's still handy to be able to refer to the exact product you used to check for accuracy against the database.

If you're into bulk cooking, I find the whole process much more rewarding if at the end I have numerous meals ready for the refrigerator and freezer, as opposed to a single meal.

Good luck!

Francl27

I used the recipe builder too. Now frankly I just eyeball because I'm not weighing every single ingredients every time I make a recipe anymore (meatloaf, meatballs etc). Too much time consuming just for one meal.

If the recipe builder was actually well designed, it wouldn't be a huge deal to re-use a recipe, but having to go through pages and pages of recipe to find the one you want to modify is just too annoying.

LadyElectron

This may not work if you like to be precise but I often skip entering a lot of the ingredients in my recipe and focus on tracking the caloric ingredients. Like if I’m making homemade tomato sauce with meat I’ll enter the just meat and olive oil. Onions, canned tomato, garlic, salt and herbs I don’t worry about. Yes that means it will underestimate the calorie content, I’ll miss out on tracking some of the fiber, sodium and vitamins but it’s worth it to me. I feel like it’s not the canned tomato that gets you it’s the pasta, olive oil you’re know? Or when I’m lazy I might just enter the salad dressing for the salad I ate if it was just mixed baby greens and some ranch. Who cares about the 8cal per cup of lettuce? I also sometimes search the dish, scroll through the entries from other users and brandname foods and pick one that seems close enough. I figure that all calorie estimates are just estimates anyway and I’d rather track imprecisely than drive be myself crazy and give up (which is what happened the first time I tried using MyFitnessPal) Good luck finding a system that works for you!!!

TisheaDH

I use the Cook'N product by DVO. It has the ability to give nutritional values and can do so based on the number of people you set.

Idontcareyoupick

I usually eye ball servings then get out the containers for what I picked and divide it all up. Not the most scientific but less stressful

Coffeelover1264

I tend to rotate the same 12 meals which I've already entered in the recipe builder. I just update the amounts. I do a new set for each season. I don't always follow it, but it works well when i do

alicebhsia

i used to do this too, calculate recipes. the trick is to write down your findings and keep them, and eventually you will get to a point where you can estimate how many calories is in your meal. i find that many of the "homemade" entries in the database to be on target compared to what i would get. so if you are feeling frazzled, i would just trust the homemade entries for dishes or use one that is based on a restaurant or brand that seems about right for portion size and calorie amount. a couple hundred calories off here or there shouldn't derail you too much! it's not worth the headache to make sure everything is so perfect and you can always overestimate the calorie count.

JeromeBarry1

I keep it very simple. In the very rare case when I try something new, I plan for the weighing of components and creation of a new recipe as part of the whole operation. With my meals remembering the most recent 100 entries in each, I've built up a readily accessible digital larder from which I choose.

This is not much different from my decades of mindlessly excessive eating, because even then it was just too much of the same few things.

sdogg626

There is one part of this I can't understand. People say weigh your finished product to figure out how many servings, what kind of scales do you have? Both my Instant Pot and my favorite casserole dish seem to be way too heavy to weigh on my scale, especially when filled with food....if I am meal prepping and I will be eating ALL of the portions myself, I just divide by 4 or 6 or whatever and figure it will work out over the week. But when it's a meal I will be sharing with bf/kids, I would like to be able to weigh out my portion with some degree of accuracy. Do I just need to get a better scale?

DX2JX2

sdogg626 wrote: »

There is one part of this I can't understand. People say weigh your finished product to figure out how many servings, what kind of scales do you have? Both my Instant Pot and my favorite casserole dish seem to be way too heavy to weigh on my scale, especially when filled with food....if I am meal prepping and I will be eating ALL of the portions myself, I just divide by 4 or 6 or whatever and figure it will work out over the week. But when it's a meal I will be sharing with bf/kids, I would like to be able to weigh out my portion with some degree of accuracy. Do I just need to get a better scale?

I just got a bigger scale.

DX2JX2

e_v_v wrote: »

I tend to cook a lot of meals that follow a recipe. On MFP, I typically add the recipe to "My Foods" and then divide the total calories by how many servings. I'm just overwhelmed by this process, needing to add in ingredients and then estimating the number of servings per recipe and the actual serving size. It is very time consuming, and don't even get me started about when the dish is not prepared by me (friend, non-chain restaurant, etc.)

Anyone have advice for doing this? How do you log homemade recipes and meals accurately without taking 23 of your 24 hours of the day doing it?

Only focus on the main items. Ignore spices and minor supporting players like the aromatics used in cooking (just add a blanket estimate of a couple of hundred calories to account for the things you don't specifically weigh). All calorie measurements are inherently inexact so no need to be super precise.

For the most part, ignoring the minor players should leave you with 4 or 5 larger items to keep track of (including cooking oil). It doesn't have to be that hard. If you don't make the same recipes all the time or if the food was prepared by others, then there really is no need to enter them into MFP ingredient by ingredient. This feature is meant to be a time saver for often repeated recipes, not a chore.

Once you've been doing this for a while, you'll start to get an 'eyeball' for serving sizes and calorie loads. This helps immensely when eating food prepared by others or at a restaurant.

ktekc

I have an 11 lb scale it has so far handled every crockpot iv'e thrown at it.