How do you calculate calories in home cooked foods?

I just break it down. Like how much beef, rice, chicken. Some of it is just guessing.

You may not have a recipe that calls for particular measurements, but there's no reason you can't measure what you're putting in it as you go. Not as big of a hassle as it sounds. Keep track of what you use, then enter it in the recipes section with number of servings and it will give you the nutritional breakdown. Purists would say weigh the full amount and divide that by whatever number of servings you think is reasonable to get a per serving weight to go by. Since I'm rarely near my calorie limit at this point, I often will just divide a pan into 4 or 8 sections and go by that (probably won't be able to get away with that as I get smaller though.)

I cook meals all the time. It's a bit of trouble at first, but it you generally prepare certain meals the same way every time, you can get a really close estimate.

Here's how I do things like stews:
Get a food scale if you don't have one. Trust me. And they are like $14 at Walmart and easy to use.
So, let's make vegetable beef stew:
Ground beef or turkey, brown it. Strain it. Now, weigh it by itself on your scale. Write down the weight of the beef on a page. Put it in the pot. Now do your tomatoes, potatoes, butter beans, carrots, onions, all of that stuff the same way. Weigh the ingredient by itself, write the weight down, put the ingredient in the pot.

Need to add water to the stew? That's ok, just weigh the water and record it, too.
Now is the tough (or if you're a dork like me, fun) part. Look up all of your ingredients on this website. Put in the weight for each ingredient and see how many calories are in each part of the stew.

I use ounces, so I add up ALL the weights and get a total. (Don't forget the water you added.)
Now add up ALL the calories and get a total. (Water is zero lol)
Divide the total number of calories by the total number of ounces and you then know really close how many calories are in each ounce.

Now, when it's done cooking, put your bowl on the scale, zero out the scale, and fill the bowl to how high you would normally fill it. I think mine comes to 10 ounces and it's 24 calories per ounce.


Things like mashed potatoes are tougher because you are eyeballing the ingredients. Well, we used to eyeball our ingredients. We don't anymore because getting fit is important to us
I boil my potatoes, drain them, and THEN weigh them. Not sure if it makes a difference. Then I add in butter, sour cream, mayonnaise, milk, whatever. But those things are weighed, too. Add the weights up for a total, add the ingredients' calories up for a total, and divide again. Once you get an idea of what the serving looks like, you can do it fairly accurately and quickly.

Have your recipe builder open and the scale nearby. Just takes a couple extra moments to weigh and use the recipe builder. Once you've used it a bit it gets much easier.