Counting calories on homemade foods?

Your best bet is to use the recipe builder. You can enter how many portions you're making and then enter the whole amount of an ingredient. It'll divide everything for you. It's great.

I usually add my recipes on my phone so I can scan the barcode of any foods that have them. We menu plan so I usually take 20 minutes or so to add the recipes for the week after I get home from the grocery store. I do not add any herbs or spices though.

my home made meals only consist of three or four ingredients, so its easy. anything more than that, i'll use the recipe builder. i keep everything simple

I love the recipe builder - makes life so much easier!

Agree! recipe builder if you use more than 3 ingredients, and save it for further use

I am wondering what others do when they eat homemade foods and then try to add them to their diary. My wife and I eat at home basically every night. So with that comes a lot of homemade foods. When I do a search for the food in the database it usually comes up with a brand. Like if I search for "spaghetti" lots of results show up with MANY different calorie counts from many different companies. Well, I know I am not eating at the companies listed so I usually look for the Generic Homemade ones. But even the generic homemade ones in some cases have +/-100 calorie counts.

I have thought "ok I will pick the highest and that way I will never truly go over my calorie intake, but then again calories are important so maybe I should take the one near the average?"

What does everyone else do? I hope I am not the only person that has this problem. Do people really take the time to go through all their ingredients and manually type in the info?

Its really easy to do. Go into the recipe section and measure/weigh all your stuff and put it in the ingredients list and let the MFP magicians tell you exactly what you are eating.

I use the recipes tab to add in the ingredients while I'm cooking. I've duplicated the recipe on my husband's profile, too. I have a lot of recipes that sound kind of the same, like pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin protein pancakes to reflect different methods I've used.

If I'm dining at a friend's house, I will guesstimate and use items already in the database. I use my hand as a guideline with the palm being about 3oz of protein and my fist being about a 1 cup serving.

If you are using a cookbook recipe, enter the title of the cookbook or website, that you got the recipe from into the database. There are a LOT of Taste of Home (TOH) recipes in there as well as food.com . Also, most good recipes books/sites have the Nutritional values listed. Its easy then to add the complete dish to the database and everyone can use the information. :happy:

I estimate ...

Weigh all the ingredients as you add them to your recipe, enter in recipe builder, then weigh entire final recipe (might need to weigh baking dish/container before cooking so you can subtract). I enter the weight of the whole final recipe divided by 100 in the "number of servings" field. So if my entire pan of spaghetti weighed 1352g, I'd enter "13.52 servings". Then when I serve myself, if I take a 123g portion, I'll track it as "1.23 servings."

You could enter "1352 servings" and not divide by 100, but I think MFP does some rounding of very small fractions so it won't be as accurate- that's why I do the 100g method.

Sounds like a pain but it takes like 10 seconds per ingredient to weigh. I keep my iPad right on the kitchen counter as I cook to quickly enter. If you're not using a food scale already, GET ONE! When I estimated portions, I did NOT lose consistently and kept giving up out of frustration, for years- until I started measuring like this. Otherwise you truly have no idea how much you're eating.

This sounds like a good way to not have to remember the serving size for different dishes. What I've been doing after weighing the finished dish and figuring out how many servings I want to divide it into is including the serving size in the name of the dish (because the only way to see the serving size of a "my recipes" food is to go back in to edit the recipe -- it doesn't show up otherwise -- it just says "one serving" where individual foods in the database will say "1 Tbsp" or "1 cup" or "28 grams" etc.). E.g., I'll name a dish "Homemade vegetable broth - salt free (serving = 1 cup = 248 g)" or "Anasazi beans (serving = 115 g)".

I also think you make a good point about possible rounding errors if you make the serving size too small. Maybe I'll just make each recipe one serving, and include the total weight in the recipe name like I do now, and then I can divide the weight of what I eat at one meal by the total weight of the recipe, and enter that in the quantity field when I add it to my diary. That should minimize the rounding errors.