Counting Calories When Eating Out and Using Recipes

alihutch18

Hi. I'm new here and I need some help with counting calories. How do I know how many calories I'm eating when I go to a local restaurant? I am using the Cooking Light Butternut Squash Soup recipe today. How do I know how many calories are in a serving?

grimendale

First bet is to look on the restaurant website and see if they have posted nutritional information. If not, try a google search to see if anyone else has already figured it out. If all else fails, find something close and use that. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Since I don't know what the Cooking Light Butternut Squash Soup recipe is (a restaurant dish? something you're cooking at home?), I don't know how to help you with that.

AmyRhubarb

If you prepared the recipe yourself, enter it into the Recipe section under the food tab. Enter all the ingredients, then how many servings it is, and you can log the number of servings you ate. It saves the recipe for you so if it's something you make often, it makes it easy to log every time. I use it a lot - I have tons of recipes in my recipe section!

As for restaurants - if it's a local place without nutritional info provided, I try to find the closest match in the database and just wing it. Been doing that for years and it hasn't messed me up.

pkw58

If you prepared the recipe yourself, enter it into the Recipe section under the food tab. Enter all the ingredients, then how many servings it is, and you can log the number of servings you ate. It saves the recipe for you so if it's something you make often, it makes it easy to log every time. I use it a lot - I have tons of recipes in my recipe section!

As for restaurants - if it's a local place without nutritional info provided, I try to find the closest match in the database and just wing it. Been doing that for years and it hasn't messed me up.

This is exactly what I do. I used this method to lose 46 pounds in 2012 and have kept it off.