Counting a recipe

saintlmm7689

Hello I am new to my fitness pal, logging individual foods that I eat is fine, but what do I do if say I have a slice of chicken Parm? How do I record the chicken and the sauce, cheese, the breading, do I have to do each ingredient individually and estimate how much breading is on so forth, Or is there a way to record the entire finished product?

goal06082021

Hello!

If you cooked the chicken Parm yourself, there is a recipe builder feature - you input all the ingredients and tell MFP how many servings it made and it calculates the calories per serving for you. On the desktop site, it's under the Food tab; on the mobile app, from the hamburger menu it's under Recipes, Meals, & Foods.

If you're following a recipe on a website, you can import it into the recipe builder, but sometimes it doesn't copy over the ingredients quite correctly, so I find it easier to just type in the ingredients myself even if I am following a recipe.

Like with logging foods normally, you also need to check and make sure the database entries it pulls for the ingredients are correct and accurate - go by the USDA for whole foods (fresh produce, raw meat, uncooked grains/beans) and go by the package label for packaged foods. Solid food should be weighed and logged per gram or ounce, liquids can be measured in cups and spoons. There are some entries that are inaccurate or flat-out wrong (I found one last night for chicken stock that said 15 cups was 8,000 calories - doubtful).

Unless I'm making a food with a clear, discrete number of servings, I prefer to set my recipes "per gram" and log the number of servings as the weight of the finished dish in grams (i.e. one serving = 1 gram). Then I log how much I ate in grams. It's a little weird at first to see "500 servings" of something in your diary, but the math checks out. If I happen to end up with an amount perfectly divisible by 10 or 100, I might set the recipe as per 10g or per 100g - like if I made 3200g of chili, maybe I log that as 32 servings of 100g each, or if I make 250g of cucumber salad, 25 servings of 10g each. Sometimes the recipe builder doesn't like it when you try to save a recipe that's 4385 servings.

saintlmm7689

Thank you for such a thorough explanation, very helpful