Finding nutritional value for meals with mixed ingredients?

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taylormoooon
taylormoooon Posts: 130 Member
in Food and Nutrition
So yesterday for example I made a beef stew. Obviously I can weigh out each individual food item in the recipe before adding them to the mix, but how do I figure out the serving size and macros when it's all finished since one scoop would include potatoes, carrots, beef, stock, etc? I find myself running into this problem a lot since I make a lot of dishes that use a mix of foods. Chili would be another one.

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  • kmash32
    kmash32 Posts: 275 Member
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    What I do is create the recipe with everything individually then weigh the whole thing and my serving size is always 100g. Therefore if the total stew weighs 950g let say there would be 9.5 servings per a pot. Then I weigh the serving I eat and if for example it is 150g then I am eating 1.5 servings.

    Hope this makes sense.
  • sympha01
    sympha01 Posts: 942 Member
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    The nutritional variance from serving-to-serving is simply not worth worrying about. Most people are introducing more error based on just not working hard enough to find the most accurate entry for each ingredient in the database. (Because protip: the database is CHOCK FULL of highly inaccurate entries).

    If you are sharing meals with your family, it might be worthwhile to 1) weigh your TOTAL finished recipe 2) weigh a single serving typical for YOU to eat; just so you can accurately figure out ON AVERAGE how much of the total recipe's nutrition you're getting. But worrying about one serving having 10 extra grams of carrots or 5 fewer grams of meat is not worth it. Law of averages, it'll be close enough.
  • taylormoooon
    taylormoooon Posts: 130 Member
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    kmash32 wrote: »
    What I do is create the recipe with everything individually then weigh the whole thing and my serving size is always 100g. Therefore if the total stew weighs 950g let say there would be 9.5 servings per a pot. Then I weigh the serving I eat and if for example it is 150g then I am eating 1.5 servings.

    Hope this makes sense.

    Oh I love this, thank you!
  • taylormoooon
    taylormoooon Posts: 130 Member
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    sympha01 wrote: »
    The nutritional variance from serving-to-serving is simply not worth worrying about. Most people are introducing more error based on just not working hard enough to find the most accurate entry for each ingredient in the database. (Because protip: the database is CHOCK FULL of highly inaccurate entries).

    If you are sharing meals with your family, it might be worthwhile to 1) weigh your TOTAL finished recipe 2) weigh a single serving typical for YOU to eat; just so you can accurately figure out ON AVERAGE how much of the total recipe's nutrition you're getting. But worrying about one serving having 10 extra grams of carrots or 5 fewer grams of meat is not worth it. Law of averages, it'll be close enough.

    Thank you! Yeah, I've just been having a lot of trouble losing fat and I weigh everything I eat. I'm thinking I just have to be overeating somehow so I want to make sure I'm tracking everything as closely as possible.
  • WestDakota
    WestDakota Posts: 2 Member
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    kmash32 wrote: »
    What I do is create the recipe with everything individually then weigh the whole thing and my serving size is always 100g. Therefore if the total stew weighs 950g let say there would be 9.5 servings per a pot. Then I weigh the serving I eat and if for example it is 150g then I am eating 1.5 servings.

    This is so brilliant! Thanks for sharing. I was inputting the recipe and then trying to guess how many servings it was, but your way, there's no guessing involved. Genius!
  • lynndot1
    lynndot1 Posts: 114 Member
    edited January 2015
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    The recipe maker is definitely your friend. If I'm making something that I can't just easily add portions in I make a recipe for it on MFP. This has been a life saver for meal prep since I usually cook a week's worth of lunches on Sunday and split it up into portions. Just make a recipe on MFP, set it to "10 servings," divide it up into 10 portions (5 days of lunches for 2 people) to freeze and just add it to my diary every day.
  • CyberTone
    CyberTone Posts: 7,337 Member
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    As others have said, create a recipe. Below is a screen shot of a Beef Stew recipe I created a while ago.

    Here are a couple of my tips:

    - The current Recipe Importer does not support fractional (decimal) serving sizes - MFP has it on the list of bugs. I generally use 230g ~ 8 oz. ~ 1 US cup as a serving size - it is a convenient scoop for one-pot meals. Use grams instead of ounces to weigh and log.

    - Use the Old Recipe Calculator to enter a new recipe. Unfortunately, once saved, you can only edit it using the new Recipe Importer Edit function, which is a PITA. So make sure your recipe using the Old Recipe Calculator is ready to save when you do click save.

    - The Name field is limited in characters, but try to fit as much information as you can in the name so you can find it again - there is currently no searching of your Recipe list, yet another bug that MFP is going to fix.

    - When editing a Recipe, open a second browser tab and use the FOOD > Database search function to search for food items in format "vegetable - raw" or "beef - raw" or "chicken - raw" to verify the food items that the MFP Recipe Importer search can't find - yet another bug.

    2le73epdg6fx.jpg
  • SherryTeach
    SherryTeach Posts: 2,836 Member
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    What I do is create a recipe for the ingredients and guess at the number of servings the recipe makes. Then when the cooking is over, I portion all of it into individual serving containers. A serving is whatever seems like the "right amount." Then I go back to the recipe builder and adjust the number of servings to whatever I ended up with. If I don't like the resulting calories per serving number, I take some out of each container, and add another serving. It's not exact science, but it works pretty well. And I end up with frozen meals, ready to go.
  • taylormoooon
    taylormoooon Posts: 130 Member
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    All great! Thanks everyone!
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
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    It's easier to just weigh the finished recipe and use the number of grams as the number of servings. Then you can just log 300 servings or whatever your portion is.

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