Do you calculate macros for homemade recipes?

grnice

I've had such a taste for chicken salad lately so I decided to make it myself, a healthier version. Well, it didn't turn out as healthy as I had hoped but it was still good! Anyway, there were 7 ingredients and it took me about 30 minutes to calculate everything including my serving size. I don't cook that often but I can't imagine doing this for every recipe I make.

How do people handle this, do they just do a quick add for calories and forget the macros or do you actually calculate everything?

rchambers2072

I do actually calculate everything. It gets saved in your recipes so you can use it again though. The more you use it, the faster you will be able to enter it all in the database, too.

RuthieCass

I always calculate everything using the recipe function. Using the MFP app on my smartphone makes this easier since I can just scan the barcode to look up different components of the recipe quickly. I've noticed that some wrapped fresh vegetables can even be found that way. Then I only have to look up a few ingredients using the search box, which I can do on the computer before or after. Yes, it takes a bit of time the first time you enter a recipe, but I like to track my macros.

kalynn06

I also use the MFP recipe application and it rarely takes me more than a few minutes to enter even fairly complex recipes. To find serving size, I just decide when I make things how many portions I'm making. If practical, I will even package up individual portions to save time later.

kaserz

I recently started blogging and was calculating each individual ingredient and it was rather time consuming. But then my friend recommended this site for tracking food. You can just do a search and most things are already on here. Saves me a lot of time!

thefreebiemom

One of the first recipes I ever had to enter into the database was lasagna. OMG it took forever. I think the hardest part is figuring out how many people you can feed. My problem is that for example if the spaghetti sauce has x calories and macros and 2 servings in the jar, but the lasagna noodles has 8 servings or something and the cheese is 4 servings or whatever. So none of the serving sizes or servings per package match up.

At least the lasagna has a specific set recipe that I follow with a madness and every noodle has to have the perfect amount of each of the ingredients on it, takes me forever to make. Whats really hard is the things that don't have a recipe, that I just know how to make and now figuring out how much of each ingredient I use to make that stuff.

But, now that things are in there I just have to click on them the next time.

lyttlewon

I do it but I don't bother with spices. That by itself saves me tons of time.

mcarter99

I think the recipe tool here is quick and awesome! The Fitbit site STILL doesn't have one, so I used to do some manually, which was annoying. I ignore spices, too. I don't track sodium or water.

If I don't know the serving count, I will weigh the entire dish, guess how many servings and then put in my description how much a serving is. Like I made curried lentil soup the other day and weighed it and it was about 80 oz. So I put it in as ten 8-oz servings. Now I weigh out 8 ozs. when I have a bowl. If I want a 10 oz bowl, I can log it as 1.25 servings.

It sounds a little OCD but that's 8-10 meals. If I get it wrong, I've gotten 8-10 meals wrong. I know I can tend to eyeball things wrong, if I don't weigh. Like if I just guessed the soup was 10 servings but then at the end of the week I could count how many I actually had (assuming it's gone) and I might've eaten it all but only had 7 servings. If so, then all 7 of those were under-estimated by almost 50%! So I weigh when I'm in serious dieting mode.