Macros and Counting

mjm630

Hi!

What is the best way to compute macro homemade meals?

For example if I want to make something like salad dressing or coconut rice, but I don’t know the serving size(s), how do I do this?

I want to be able to input all of my ingredients without knowing the serving size and then input the amount I take in MFP or some other site and have it calculated it for me. Sometimes I don’t know how much I’m going to take and I don’t know how much it’s going to make!

AnnPT77

Use the recipe builder, and a food scale.

Keep track of the ingredients, ideally by weight for accuracy. Then make the dish. When it's done - after cooking if it's a cooked thing - weigh the total finished amount. Use the total number of grams as the number of servings. (If it's a big number, MFP will give you a warning message. I don't remember the exact text, but it's a "did you really mean 752 servings?" kind of message. Tell it you meant it, and it'll accept it.)

Then, when you eat some of the food, weigh out the amount you eat. In your diary, tell MFP that you ate that many servings of the food.

Example: Let's say I make a bean/vegetable soup. I'd start by weighing the empty pot, and note that. Then I'd start putting ingredients in the pot, zeroing the scale before each add. Zero scale, dump in can of beans, note grams of beans, zero, dump in chopped onions, note grams, zero, dump in tomatoes, note grams, etc. Then cook the soup (which will reduce its weight through evaporation of water as steam).

When the soup is done, weigh the whole pot of soup. Subtract the weight of the empty pot. Making up numbers, lets say the pot of soup was 1872 grams, and the pot weighs 256 grams. That means I have 1616 grams of soup (1872-256). So, I'll put the ingredient list in the MFP recipe builder, and set number of servings at 1616.

When I eat the soup, I put my bowl on the scale, zero, ladle in some soup, read the total. Let's say it's 283 grams. In my diary, I put that I ate 283 servings of soup, and MFP does the calorie/nutrient math.

It's pretty easy, once you get used to doing it.

mjm630

Thank you! I’m guessing it’s close enough if some servings have more beans than others, etc?

AnnPT77

mjm630 wrote: »

Thank you! I’m guessing it’s close enough if some servings have more beans than others, etc?

Yup. Keep in mind that if you're doing this consistently, one bowl of whatever is a little under the average calories for the recipe, another bowl (of some other recipe, maybe even) a little over - it'll work out fine in the big picture. All those variation numbers from something like that - when you're being reasonably accurate in general - are a small percentage of your daily deficit, anyway. Mathematically, it's NBD over time.