how to calculate calories / nutritional values in home made

roland72

Hello everybody, I'm new on the site and I'm loving the feedback and the food diary and how it tracks calories and nutrition. It certainly beats manual lists or excel spreadsheets

I have started the biggest loser programme, which allows for one "normal" meal a day. My question is for people who don't use ready meals, pre prepared portions or complete food packs from various diets. Personally I can't stomach ready meals as I find them pretty rubbery and artificial tasting so I tend to do a lot of home cooking. My problem is, where do I start with calculating the calories / nutritional values of home cooked meals? I know I can assign meals or create and add new items to the my food section, but how do I work the actual values out?

For instance, tonight I made chicken with steamed rice and peppers. Now how do I work out how many calories was in the meal, how much fat, protein, fibre, carbs, ... ?

One solution is to weigh every single ingredient, look on the pack and add those values up. That would be a bit cumbersome and long winded but it would work, but what with cooking? Most raw foods actually increase their calorific value when cooked so how do you factor that in?

Any help or pointers would be very welcome

Silky815

Let me say good luck with this. I find myself looking at all of the values of everything I buy, when I go grocery shopping. This may be the only way to calculate everything, and we have to take the time to do this, if we want to lose the weight.

barbiecat

:flowerforyou: I have been doing this for over a year and it works great. Yesterday I fixed chicken breast with roasted veggies. In my food diary I entered the individual chicken and veggies and the butter spray and it told me all the values on my food diary.......I have a food scale and measuring cups to find amounts........once you've entered a food it stays in your data base so you can choose it again. At first it takes time to search for the foods in the data base but then you have them in your favorites or recent foods and you can use them again.


Last winter I made a yummy soup and I entered all the ingredients in the recipe in my food diary and then saved the meal and gave it a name.......today when i made the soup again, I just selected the meal from my list and it added in all the ingredients.


It takes awhile to learn how the site works but once you get going, it is easy and really helpful.
:bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile:

daj150

Just posting a quick answer. In these forums, or other sites on the Internet, look up the links for government nutritional info. There are sites that will tell you the raw and cooked, dry and wet, etc. values. Unfortunately, you will either have to look up a similar meal that someone else posted and hope they were correct, or you will need to manually add it all up. I personally have started trying to find sites or recipe books that give all of the nutrional values and serving sizes, and then I post them on here for everyone to view. So, my advice is to check out those sites and to post your recipes for all to access...the more this database grows, the easier it will be.

bethvandenberg

What I do b/c I cook every day is program it into the recipe section. Then it does all the math for me. I do that partly b/c I always have leftovers and that way as I consume them I can continue to enter my food. Plus often I make the same things.

Hope that helps and good luck.

lutzsher

Once you work with MFP for a while you build up a solid data base of all your "regular" items. Getting there and entering your food and recipes can be a bit cumbersome when you start but it is well worth it.

archiegirl

I do it the long old fashioned way....each ingredient totalled and then divide by servings. sometimes I 'cheat' and use a mix and then add ingredients, like one of the vita muffin mixes, I might add a banana, or pumpkin, or applesauce to one of those mixes and just add the numbers for the addition to my final numbers. an excel spreadsheet works wonders too. I never thought of using the mfp database. but you can be sure I am going to do that now. what a great idea. I have found that once I make something and know it's diet approved, I don't measure it anymore, I just know I can have it. it's the new recipes and dining out that's hard on me.

SyreetaJayne1

What I do b/c I cook every day is program it into the recipe section. Then it does all the math for me. I do that partly b/c I always have leftovers and that way as I consume them I can continue to enter my food. Plus often I make the same things.

Hope that helps and good luck.

I do the same. If it's recipe i'm making that i can look up the nutritional values for, i just add it to the database. if i have to manually enter it because i don't have the nutritional info, i enter it as a recipe.

mem50

What I do b/c I cook every day is program it into the recipe section. Then it does all the math for me. I do that partly b/c I always have leftovers and that way as I consume them I can continue to enter my food. Plus often I make the same things.

Hope that helps and good luck.

About the best way I have found to do it too. It's a little work at first but if it is something you do quite often it will be there waiting for you.

Sporty98

Definitely use the recipe section here.....It's a great way to get the actual values for your home-cooked versious of things. ALSO, measure everything! I measure each thing that I'm eating.....A nutritional scale would be great! (I do not have one, but maybe Santa will bring me one!)

NoAdditives

I just estimate and usually use foods that are already in the MFP database. Since I've been cooking and baking for years I'm pretty good at measuring out cups and tablespoons of food. I'm not super strict about measuring my foods and sticking to my calorie goal because I've found that I need to consume more calories than average in order to lose weight. So as long as I'm exercising I allow myself some wiggle room.

As far as home cooking goes, I just enter things in individually. The only time I've ever entered in recipes was Thanksgiving. For most meals I look up each ingredient and enter the amount. It may seem a little tedious at first but once it becomes a habit it only takes a minute or two and is really pretty easy.

roland72

Thanks a lot everybody for the input and tips. I had a feeling that there wouldn't be an easy way out of this one.

Actually I think it might be a good thing if I have to weigh and measure things and then build up a database in the my food selection. Gives me a better idea on portion control. I have started doing this for some of my snacks already and have realised that what I consider to be "a portion" is actually a lot bigger than what it should be.

Lyadeia

What I do b/c I cook every day is program it into the recipe section. Then it does all the math for me. I do that partly b/c I always have leftovers and that way as I consume them I can continue to enter my food. Plus often I make the same things.

Hope that helps and good luck.

This.

I have spent the time to enter in my favorite recipes with the exact brands that I use (cause different brands of the same item have different nutritional values!) and saved those for my personal use.

Then using those recipes, I will make my weekly food plan (I don't log food after I eat it, I plan out what to eat so I know how much I will be eating, estimating exercise calories added back in.)

Once you add them into the recipe function they will always be there for you. You can even change the serving size in the recipe function and it does the math for you per serving.

Well worth the time and effort to enter it in.