Accurate calorie counts for food

AlexBoBalex79

I like to cook so most of our meals are homemade. I’m having a hard time reconciling calorie counts that I find on my fitness pal, believing they are true. For example, I made a homemade chicken soup. It’s a whole chicken, carrots, onions, celery, tomato and corn. Nothing gourmet but quite delicious! It makes a huge pot. When I want to enter in my calorie count on the diary it says one cup only has 80 cal, another one is around 100 cal which I find that very hard to believe. How do you know what to choose in the diaries? I really would expect a bowl of chicken soup to be closer to 300.

srk369

I wouldn't use a recipe from someone else. You can build your own in the recipe builder. I always weigh the pot I am using, weigh each ingredient and when the meal is done I weigh the final product. Subtract the weight of the pot and you know how many servings are in the recipe. I then note my recipes "enchilada casserole (1g)" and enter how many grams I eat.

malibu927

Enter all the ingredients in the recipe builder. That way you know what's in it unlike database entries.

AlexBoBalex79

I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

Strudders67

Most of my meals are home made too. I regularly make chicken and veg soup using a chicken carcass, once I've cut off all the meat for my salads. I simmer the carcass / bones for a while then remove the bones and pick off any meat. I then use the recipe tab on MFP and enter the ingredients, weighing the meat and vegetables that actually go in to the soup. I typically guess at it being 6 portions but, once I've divided the soup into freezable pots, I adjust that if needed. The one I made last week gave me 8 portions, with each being calculated to be 54 calories so the 80 that you found could be right. Once I've eaten those and make another, I edit the recipe to update the weight of ingredients going in to the next soup.

The only thing to be careful of is that you need to select the entry from your recipes, not your previous Lunch / Dinner entries to make sure you get the current soup.

Also, when you've entered your ingredients and clicked 'Find', double check that MFP has actually picked up the right things. I 'replace' a lot when I'm building any recipe but once it's done all I have to adjust, in future, are the quantities. If I don't use a particular ingredient the next time, I change the quantity for that item to 1g or 0.5g so that any calorific measurement is negligible but the ingredient remains in the recipe.

cwolfman13

You need to use the recipe builder. How would the database know what was in your chicken soup vs some random person's entry for their chicken soup which is what those generic entries are. Use the database for individual food items and ingredients, not recipes. Build your own recipe.

AlexBoBalex79

OK, so I'm now trying to add it in the recipes. I used 1 whole chicken. It was 3 lbs. The builder lists many different whole chickens, I selected "Chicken, whole chicken". Now it's asking me how many servings at how many 4 ounce servings. So, 3*16=48/4(oz) - 12. Plus my other ingredients, it came out to 272 cals if it's 12 servings. Much better than the 80 it was predicting.

AlexBoBalex79

Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

kami3006

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

He can view your diary and copy the meal over to his then adjust the servings if needed.

AlexBoBalex79

kami3006 wrote: »

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

He can view your diary and copy the meal over to his then adjust the servings if needed.

Thank you!

missysippy930

Recipe builder.

srk369

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

If you are creating it on a desktop, there is an option to make it public. I don't always do that though, so I'll take a screen capture of the final nutrition for say 100g and then make a new food item, enter the nutrition values and then name it with my name in the title and give that exact name to my husband...example "Fried Rice - (100g) Stacie's"...then he will search on that.

kshama2001

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

I don't use servings in the conventional sense - I use total grams for recipe (subtract weight of pot). Then a serving = the amount of grams I ate.

I have a notebook with the weights of all my pots and pans and a scale that weighs up to 11 pounds, which works for everything but the dutch oven when it's filled with gumbo.

There are kitchen scales which will weigh up to 50 pounds, but that's definitely more than I need.

livingleanlivingclean

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

I think a bigger headache and time waster would be using random entries that aren't accurate and not achieving my goals because I wasn't logging properly...

Once you get in to the swing of things, logging becomes less time consuming.

lynn_glenmont

srk369 wrote: »

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

If you are creating it on a desktop, there is an option to make it public. I don't always do that though, so I'll take a screen capture of the final nutrition for say 100g and then make a new food item, enter the nutrition values and then name it with my name in the title and give that exact name to my husband...example "Fried Rice - (100g) Stacie's"...then he will search on that.

Does that actually work now? I haven't tried it in a while, because they used to ask all kinds of questions for categorizing the recipe and want you to input directions, and then it said that they hadn't actually implemented that feature yet and were just trying to build up enough shared recipes to be able to roll out the feature.


*ETA: I just checked, and they still haven't implemented the recipe-sharing feature. This is the message you get if you say you want to share (plus a lot of fields to fill in):



We are currently accepting submissions to the MyFitnessPal recipe database. Once we receive enough submissions, we'll create a recipe section where users can browse recipes submitted by other members. To submit your recipe to the database, please provide the following additional information.

yirara

AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »

I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

It doesn't really. I do cook with lots of ingredients as well and it doesn't take long. I even change the amounts of ingredients while cooking to fit my goal. Say I make white rice with crispy mince.

The mince goes portioned into the freezer, thus I know it's 100gr unless there's a different number on the bag. I put the pot of my rice cooker on the scale, tar, weigh out 80gr, add water, switch it on.

clean various vegetables, put on scale one by one, log, cut
Put oil bottle on scale, tar, oil in pan, weight. Stir fry veggies and log in the meantime.

Spring onion, on scale, log, cut in small rings
put small mortar on scale, tar, weight out sesame seeds, log, crush
peel garlic, put on scale, log, cut

veggies out of pan, add a bit more oil after weighing, crisp up mince with spring onions and sesame seeds and garlic. Grab soy sauce, measure in cup, from there into pan. stir, log. Grab pot of something fermented, on scale and tar, spoonful into pan, stir, log.

Serve with something pickled, after weighing and logging.

it sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't. There's just the very quick step of going from cutting board to pan via scale, which takes 2-5 seconds extra depending on if I log right away or while cooking. Doesn't take more time at all. And as I've used all those ingredients before they come up first on my phone when searching. For broccoli I just type Br and it's already there.

Is it more difficult? Not really! I'm simply not able to cook with more than one pot at the same time, but I still manage to weigh and log while cooking.

So with 12 ingredients we're looking at a longer cooking time of about 1 minute.

And servings per pot: you know how much calories are in the same pot. You probably have an idea how many people you want to feed for how long. So that's easy. 12 meals? Just go to your stored meals and add 0.083 (1/12 - btw, does the recipe builder take decimals?) and you have your serving. Or weigh out the whole pot (weigh pot empty beforehand) and then weigh your serving.