Home-made meals and keeping track of calories.

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  • momjuls
    momjuls Posts: 2
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    My family eats whole foods mostly and I cook from scratch 95% of the time. I agree with the fellow posters. However, I'm not so strict that I measure my foods but try to accurately approximate the amounts in my serving of the dish I make and so far I think it has worked for me. I get lazy sometimes and don't bother adding small snacks of blueberries or other low calorie fruits and vegetables especially if I know I've been good that day or week.
  • TheArmadillo
    TheArmadillo Posts: 299 Member
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    I enter all ours in the recipe builder but I do it on a weekend when I am doing the meal plan for the week, while watching telly. I work and my husband is at home so does the cooking during the week but likes me to plan the meals and email him the recipes. While I am doing all that, compiling a shopping list, working out lunches as well, its not much more to enter the recipes as well.

    We tend to have more new recipes each week than repeats and even when we do repeat the meals we tend to tweak the recipes.

    The only thing that pisses me off is when the app crashes just as I'm finishing entering a long recipe and I have to start again.
  • rosemaryhon
    rosemaryhon Posts: 507 Member
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    I'm sure a lot of us here are home-cooks, LOL, myself included - how do you guys manage with keeping track of the number of calories in the meals that you guys make? It's obviously easier to keep track of foods that are already premade or pre-packaged from the beginning, so how do you do it when you're working from scratch? Do I really have to measure out each and every ingredient I use, or is there an easier method? For example, I tend to do a lot of stir-frys - where would I begin to keep track of calories then, for instance?

    Thanks for the advice you guys!!! =D

    If you take a look at my (open) diary, you'll see often my meal input is LONG LOL ~ because I'll add each ingredient I've used to cook a homemade meal (eg, 1 tbls olive oil, tsp garlic, cup of peppers, etc along that line).

    Hope that helps! :)
  • shalysewrightbethea
    shalysewrightbethea Posts: 48 Member
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    I'm sure a lot of us here are home-cooks, LOL, myself included - how do you guys manage with keeping track of the number of calories in the meals that you guys make? It's obviously easier to keep track of foods that are already premade or pre-packaged from the beginning, so how do you do it when you're working from scratch? Do I really have to measure out each and every ingredient I use, or is there an easier method? For example, I tend to do a lot of stir-frys - where would I begin to keep track of calories then, for instance?

    Thanks for the advice you guys!!! =D

    Right now I'm trying to look up my fresh ingredients online and see what the nutritional value is. I also compare it to one that I search for in the food database on here. When you make a new recipe it divides up the calories per serving.Of course I've only been doing this for 5 days so there is bound to be tons of better options but so far this is agreeing with me.
  • Koldnomore
    Koldnomore Posts: 1,613 Member
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    I get out my pad of paper and pencil and start weighing. Everything that goes in the pot I weigh raw/uncooked and write down on my paper (including spices!). Once the meal is done I weigh the whole thing to get my total weight then I log it in the recipe builder either as a new recipe or a modification of one that's already there (I wish you could tweak the numbers instead of having to re-enter it completely). When I take my portion I weigh it and then divide by the total to get my serving size.

    Pain in the *kitten*..maybe.. but it has helped me lose 55 lbs so far so I am just going to suck it up and do it because it works!
  • brower47
    brower47 Posts: 16,356 Member
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    Weigh everything you put in the recipe and write it down. Then input everything into the recipe builder on this website. Then, when you eat the food you've prepared, weigh it and log the number of servings you've eaten. That's what I do anyway. It really helps with portion control.
  • ChangingAmanda
    ChangingAmanda Posts: 486 Member
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    The app is great because it has a barcode scanner that makes entering foods into your diary and recipe builder very. The app also allows you to edit the amount of an ingredient instead of removing and re-adding like the website does.

    I use the recipe builder for the majority of my meals since they're frozen crockpot meals that I've made on the weekends. For lunch, I just copy the previous day's sandwich and make adjustments as needed. For my breakfast smoothie, I've saved as a meal my most commonly used smoothies.
  • MyM0wM0w
    MyM0wM0w Posts: 2,008 Member
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    And even with the Recipe Builder you can go back and revise the ingredients list. For example, my husband makes omelettes every Sunday morning so I have a recipe named "Hunky's Famous Omelette". It always has three eggs, zucchini and cheese, but I typically swap out the other ingredients like mushrooms, tomatoes etc., then save it and post it.

    This.
  • odddrums
    odddrums Posts: 342 Member
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    I usually just log the ingredients and spitball it. I try to overestimate my calories for each ingredient and log all the oils and butters. I've built a few recipes but it's only for stuff I eat all the time. I figure everything is an estimate anyway and the calories you burn each day varies so there's no reason to go crazy. So long as I'm full and in my calorie range I'm fine.
  • princelukas777
    princelukas777 Posts: 36
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    THANKS YOU GUYS!!! Sounds like a definite pain in the butt, but I guess we do what we gots to do!!! LOL. The only tough part is that I'm a totally spontaneous and experimental kind of guy, so recipes are anything but consistent...hahahahah. I'll try my best!!!

    SMILES to all my fellow cooks out there!!! =D
  • kathrynmahan
    kathrynmahan Posts: 7 Member
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    After reading the comments I realize that in MFP terms I'm a dinosaur. When I started (5 years ago) you had to do all the totaling yourself and only add the nutritional info for the entire meal. That made ingredient substitution impossible. I'll try the recipe builder, it looks like maybe it could fit my needs.

    Good reason to follow a thread I suppose... :)
  • laserturkey
    laserturkey Posts: 1,680 Member
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    I use the recipe builder on the site here and enter each ingredient. Then it's not inconvenient to update the recipe if I make it a little differently the next time.
  • mommyshortlegs
    mommyshortlegs Posts: 402 Member
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    The process is rather a pain in the rear, but provided you stick to your recipes in future (or at least approximately), the tedium need only be initial. I store my recipes in Evernote*, and when I enter them into MFP I note nutritional information directly in Evernote as well as linking the corresponding MFP entry for quick reference later -- helpful when I need to pull up and re-save a recipe simply to bring it to the forefront of my MFP recipe database for easier addition to my food diary. MFP's handling of recipes could certainly be better (I have ample suggestions!), but it is possible -- if, again, painful -- to work with the system as-is.

    An example of how I format MFP-entered recipes within Evernote:
    [recipe title here]
    Yield: 8 servings of 1 c., 200 cal./serving [MFP recipe link here]

    [ingredient #1] (45 cal.)
    [ingredient #2] (200 cal.)
    [ingredient #3] (57 cal.)

    [instructions]
    [photo]

    *http://www.evernote.com/

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