Frustrated and overwhelmed calculating calories for homemade meals

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  • DX2JX2
    DX2JX2 Posts: 1,921 Member
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    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
    DX2JX2 Posts: 1,921 Member
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    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
    ktekc Posts: 879 Member
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    I have an 11 lb scale it has so far handled every crockpot iv'e thrown at it.

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