How do you track your calories when you cook from scratch?
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jalence
Posts: 9 Member
It seems like the database is full of processed food but "clean" ingredients are hard to find. For example, last night I made chicken & biscuits from scratch, including the stock. There were a few chicken & biscuit entries in the database, but no way to tell if those recipes are similar to mine. So I entered my own recipe, but it was incredibly time consuming to find all the ingredients. Do you do this every time you cook something new? Or am I missing something? Looking forward to your words of wisdom...
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Unfortunately that is what you have to do to create a recipe. It is a bit time consuming, but once it in, you just pick it from your list. I usually try a recipe a couple of times before I take the time to enter it. I try to avoid using any prepared ingredients primarily because of the sodium content and preservatives. We purchase only organic meats or those that are hormone and antibiotic free. Since adopting this most of my gastric issues have gone away. So even if it is a bit cumbersome to create recipes, it is definitely worth it.0
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Yes, I put my own recipes in. Usually when searching for raw ingredients I'll add another word like "fresh" or "raw" something that will narrow the search down. Using a few tricks makes it go a lot faster. Healthier recipes from magazines I've found people put those in. I just double check their info and use it.0
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I will log my own recipes. If I find that is too time consuming, then I will try to choose a database food which is close enough to mine and go with "estimated" calories for that meal.0
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Darn it, I was hoping for an easy answer. :-) Thanks for the tips & feedback. I am working on entering more recipes...0
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Sometimes what I've done is find a identical recipe online somewhere that lists the nutritional content. Then I just create the food and put in that nutritional information. The internet is vast enough that I have yet to not find something like that where someone's already done the work for me.0
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I also create my own recipes. It's not too bad once you get used to it.0
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Most of the time I just enter the individual ingredients, rather than making a recipe. I use a lot of the same stuff (vegetables, grains, etc.) so it comes up in my "recently used" very quickly.0
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I'm entering all my recipes within the recipe calculator. Once you're used to it, it goes faster, and if you're using MFP for quite a long time, chances are that a lot of your recipes will came back in your food log.0
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If the recipe is online, the recipe importer feature is a life saver and very quick.0
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It seems like the database is full of processed food but "clean" ingredients are hard to find. For example, last night I made chicken & biscuits from scratch, including the stock. There were a few chicken & biscuit entries in the database, but no way to tell if those recipes are similar to mine. So I entered my own recipe, but it was incredibly time consuming to find all the ingredients. Do you do this every time you cook something new? Or am I missing something? Looking forward to your words of wisdom...
I eat a diet based on all natural foods and no chemically or industrially processed food. I eat " processed " food in the sense of pickling, fermenting, drying, cooking, baking, grating and all the other things one does on the process of making food edible.
In over a year at MFP I have never had a problem finding the ingredients in the data base.
Yesterday I ate " Mangold " ( an old Heirloom form of European chard).....and there were dozens of entries for it.
I cook all my food and never look for a recipe. I just log all the ingredients and that's it.
If I would make biscuits ( which I don't ) I would just log the amount of flour, fat and whatever else you use. If I make chicken, I log the weight of the raw chicken, the raw veggies, the spices and herbs ( if they have calories ) and that's it.
I would never trust the calories in someone else's recipes to be the same as mine, but also don't have the time to develop recipes and also don't believe that they are the same from meal to meal, because often one chicken thigh and drum stick weigh more or less than the other times and tomatoes and onions are bigger or smaller. So I just list ingredients according to their weight and with a 50 pound loss, I figure I am doing something right.
My food log is open in case you want to see examples.
Good Luck !
PS: Just in case....don't be shocked to find two 500-calorie days a week in my log. I practice 5:2 IF.....0
