Calories of homemade meals

lauraloy2013

Hi everyone,

I've moved back home with family recently and have been making more homecooked meals with more ingredients rather than packaged things with nutritional values on. I'm struggling a bit deciding how many calories are in meals without having to put each ingredient/herb/sprinkle in? Does anyone have any advice on ways to do this?

_Zardoz_

Put them into the recipe builder and build the recipe. you can then use that recipe every time you need it. My Kitchen scale is on the side it takes 2 seconds to weigh everything as I chop it. I enter it on my tablet as I go.

SezxyStef

Put them into the recipe builder and build the recipe. you can then use that recipe every time you need it. My Kitchen scale is on the side it takes 2 seconds to weigh everything as I chop it. I enter it on my tablet as I go.

Yup this...

Unless it's something simple like chicken, rice and cooked carrots then I just log them individually post cooking.

Xingy01

What I used to do is add up the total calories of all the ingredients I was using, then divide it by how many portions you have. It's not going to be exact, but no calorie counts are exact anyway.

120by30

Use the recipe builder. It definitely seems excessive and time-consuming at first, but you're probably going to use the recipe again. Then it will already be there. You won't regret it when you have all your own recipes in there for the picking.

ottermotorcycle

Herbs and sprinkles you may be able to get away with not counting - or adding a "quick add" 5-20 calories. These things normally don't have too many calories.

Other than that, measure everything. A food scale actually makes it easier instead of harder. You can just put whatever bowl you're using on the scale and zero it, then add the ingredient and write down the weight. To add another ingredient to the same bowl, just zero it again.

Plus you'll find places where you can cut corners as you experiment - can you make mashed potatoes with skim milk? Bread chicken with high-fiber cereal? These are the reasons I choose not to use the recipe builder, because I rarely make the same thing twice. You can always "remember" or "copy" a meal that you reproduce and change things that are different.

Aaron_K123

Hi everyone,

I've moved back home with family recently and have been making more homecooked meals with more ingredients rather than packaged things with nutritional values on. I'm struggling a bit deciding how many calories are in meals without having to put each ingredient/herb/sprinkle in? Does anyone have any advice on ways to do this?

Use a food scale to weigh each ingredient you add and add up the nutritional values for each portion. Cook your food and at the end weight all of the prepared food. Look at the total calories for the entire prep and divide by a number that gives you a reasonable number of calories per serving. Divide the total weight of the food by the same number then divvy it up into portions of that weight.

This becomes total guesswork without a food scale.

So for instance you add up all the ingredients and its 2000 calories. You want 400 calories per serving so you want 5 portions. You weigh the final food and its 1000g so you split that into 5 containers each with 200g. You now have 5 400 calorie meals and you know exactly whats in them in terms of your macros.

MFP provides a handy "recipe" section where you can add ingredients one by one by weight and find out what the final breakdown is. You can then save that recipe and serving size and then use that to log.

asciiqwerty

I use a mix od the recipe builder and the meal saver

at the mment we have a couple of kilos of home-made butternut squash gnocci in the freeser that my hubby made - i know we'll be eating it for a while so i put it in as a recipe

there are other meals that we make frequently with similar ingredients but not the same, as i wil add whateverveg i have in the fridge - for these i use the meal saver add them and modify as required as it's quicker than adding everything from scratch again

try both see what works for you

sweetpea03b

The recipe builder is nice to have. I put in my favorite recipes and I always have them for next time. The way the new one works you don't even have to go through a huge list of ingredients... just type it in line by line and MFP finds the items for you.. and you can approve it before saving.

molonlabe762

Put them into the recipe builder and build the recipe. you can then use that recipe every time you need it. My Kitchen scale is on the side it takes 2 seconds to weigh everything as I chop it. I enter it on my tablet as I go.

Yep