I HAVE NO CLUE

Rosita
Rosita Posts: 3
edited September 19 in Introduce Yourself
I DONT KNOW HOW TO LOG IN FOOD THAT I COOK FOR MY SELF NOT FROM A DIET BOOK IM HISPANIC SO I COOK ALL THE TIME. SO HOW DO I COUNT CALORIES AND EVERYTHIN ELS PLEASE HELP!!!!

Replies

  • Rosita
    Rosita Posts: 3
    I DONT KNOW HOW TO LOG IN FOOD THAT I COOK FOR MY SELF NOT FROM A DIET BOOK IM HISPANIC SO I COOK ALL THE TIME. SO HOW DO I COUNT CALORIES AND EVERYTHIN ELS PLEASE HELP!!!!
  • pecksun8
    pecksun8 Posts: 570
    It does take a lot of work, but if you use items that have the nutritional information in the package, then start adding everything up that you put in your meal. And when you can't find a certain item, because lets say it's a fruit, vegtable, or home grown items, then look it up on the web. There are so many food and calorie sites that will tell you just how many calories are in everything.

    Your best bet is to buy a book that has calories of food from fast food, vegtables, fruits, even flour and sugar when measured out. Also get a scale to weigh your food.

    Like lets say you used a cup of whole wheat flour, 1/4 cup 2% milk, and a tablespoon of salt....

    1 cup of whole wheat flour is 407calories
    1/4 cup of 2% milk is 34 cal
    tbspn salt is 0 cal (but high in sodium)

    now you know how many calories are in the entire mixture, 441 calories and lets say it weighs 1 lb.
    now weight the mixture and divide it into 4 equal parts, like you might do for a meal.
    So 1/4 of the mixture is roughly 110 calories and weighs 4 ounces.

    Now you can take your entire meal and log it into your food as a new food, and just enter the name of the food, and how many calories the entire meal is, and if you have a scale weigh everything by ounces and keep the ounces as your portion size.
    It is a lot of work, but once you put in a few of your meals it gets easier.

    here is a great website for finding out how many calories is in just about anything...

    http://www.fitwatch.com/caloriecounter.html

    And when I am making something from scratch, I keep a notepad with me and I write down all my ingrediants and how much of each, then I total up all the calories and how much the whole thing weighs (have your scale already adjusted to the bowl your useing) and then divide it by the portion size, which I do by ounces.
  • jules1984
    jules1984 Posts: 439 Member
    Hey, that's a really helpful post to everyone, thanks!
  • tamifanny
    tamifanny Posts: 113
    Thanks for the info! I could use this for myself too:happy:
  • Ezzie
    Ezzie Posts: 665 Member
    That makes a lot of sense. I do things a bit differently.

    I use the daily food log for a day before I started keeping track.
    I enter each item as if it were an item for a meal ,(dinner usually) and let the computer keep track of nutritional amounts.
    When I;m done I figure out how many servings, divide the totals by that.
    Write them down quick before I forget or erase by mistake:noway:
    Then I enter the numbers as my own food.
    If it's something my hubby eats as well, or that I might make again I list it as B and J's (whatever) and share the info with the data base. That way Jamerz can log it easily.
    Next recipe I go back and delete old and enter new.

    Hope that helps:flowerforyou:
    Ezzie
  • Livi_Loves_Pink
    Livi_Loves_Pink Posts: 754
    I use the recepie calculator at SparkPeople.

    http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp
  • Poison5119
    Poison5119 Posts: 1,460 Member
    http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

    This one is really good. If you're going to make an entire chicken casserole, you enter the number of servings, then enter all your measured ingredients (1/2 cup noodles, 16 ounces chicken, etc), and it'll break it up into calories per serving the weight of the serving in grams, and it includes all the standard nutritional information per serving. It's pretty amazing.
  • last25
    last25 Posts: 83
    http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

    This one is really good. If you're going to make an entire chicken casserole, you enter the number of servings, then enter all your measured ingredients (1/2 cup noodles, 16 ounces chicken, etc), and it'll break it up into calories per serving the weight of the serving in grams, and it includes all the standard nutritional information per serving. It's pretty amazing.

    Thanks for the link, that really helps.

    Great question/post by the way ROSITA and good advice PECKSUN8 :)
  • pecksun8
    pecksun8 Posts: 570
    sorry for the type-o's and misspellings....ugh

    But thanks for the compliment!
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