How to allow for home cooked meal calories

Are you aware of the recipe option on MFP? Weigh the total amounts of the ingredients, weigh the total amount of the finished cooked casserole, curry, etc., enter the total grams of the dish as the number of servings, and when you weigh your portion in grams, that's the number of servings you enter.

I can't really think of a "close enough" method that doesn't involve some kind of estimates that are just a less accurate way of accomplishing the same thing (e.g., "OK, there were 2 lbs of beef, and I think we're going to get three meals out of it, so for two of us that's six servings, so I'll say I had 1/3 pound of beef each time" -- ignoring whether you and your wife eat the same amount as each other -- "and there was a pound of potatoes, so I'll say I had 3 1/2 oz. of potatoes, and we used about a quarter cup of oil, that's four Tbsp, which is 12 tsp., so I'll say I had 2 tsp. of oil, and there was a can of tomatoes, so I'll figure one-sixth of the can of tomatoes...etc." -- frankly, for anything that makes multiple servings, like a casserole, stew, baked goods, to me it seems easier to enter the recipe, and weigh the total recipe, and weigh each portion as I have it.)

Are you weighing all your other food?

Edited to fix typo.

Restaurant meals are notoriously hard to calculate. But home cooked meals are easy.

Step 1: Invest in a food scale. (You can get one off Amazon for like $10. It's the best money you'll ever spend.)
Step 2: Weigh the ingredients in your recipe. Enter them into your recipe calculator.
Step 3: Now weigh the finished cooked recipe. Log the weight in grams of the finished recipe as the number of servings. For instance, let's say the finished recipe weighs 300g, then you log that the recipe makes 300 servings.
Step 4: Measure out how much of it you eat, and log that many servings. Say your portion is 150g. Log 150 servings.

Done and done.

I use the recipe builder as well. I mean yeah, it's not going to be spot on because you might get more meat in this serving or more noodles in that one. But I figure it's close enough.

I often find similar dishes in the database.

MarcyKirkton wrote: »

I often find similar dishes in the database.

Careful with those: They're probably going to be extremely inaccurate. They've been added by members and you have absolutely no idea what went into them or whether the calories are in any way similar to yours.

I realize not everyone is as OCD as I am about trying to log and track accurately. But at some point, those entries aren't much better than putting your finger up to the wind and taking a wild guess. Far better to enter your frequent recipes into the calculator once, and then use those each time you make those recipes.

nyponbell wrote: »

I don't use the recipe option, but make a "meal" out of the ingredients.

I do that with some recipes where the ingredient quantities are likely to change each time I cook them. Stir-fry for example gets input as a "meal" instead of a recipe. Meals are easier to edit on the fly.

segacs wrote: »

Restaurant meals are notoriously hard to calculate. But home cooked meals are easy.

Step 1: Invest in a food scale. (You can get one off Amazon for like $10. It's the best money you'll ever spend.)
Step 2: Weigh the ingredients in your recipe. Enter them into your recipe calculator.
Step 3: Now weigh the finished cooked recipe. Log the weight in grams of the finished recipe as the number of servings. For instance, let's say the finished recipe weighs 300g, then you log that the recipe makes 300 servings.
Step 4: Measure out how much of it you eat, and log that many servings. Say your portion is 150g. Log 150 servings.

Done and done.

Alternate step 3 would be to break it into single serve portions and just say it serves that many.

Eg. you added up the recipe to be 1200 calories total. Say it serves 4 - that's 300 each serving. If you eat that over the week, it's not such a big deal if one day is actually 250 and the next is 350 since it will balance out.

However, use the quoted step 3 if you're feeling a family or if it'll take you longer than a week to eat the leftovers.

I put that recipe in MFP. That's one reason I chose this app. So when I make my roasted chicken curry with veggies I just pull up my recipes and there it is!

mw442 wrote: »

Thanks everyone for their posts. Seems I need to give recipe builder a try. Seems my guesstimates are not far off as another kg bit the dust last week!!

The truth is that most people can lose weight without logging all that accurately, at first. Just by tracking and watching what you eat, you're probably making big changes in your routine, and the pounds should start to come off from that alone. Even if you're off by a couple hundred calories here or there, you're still eating at a pretty big deficit, so it doesn't matter all that much.

Most people hit a wall at some point though where they feel like they've plateaued. Usually what's happened is that the deficits have gotten smaller as the weight has come off, and the logging inaccuracy simply caught up to them.

That's when they'll go out and buy a food scale and start logging everything more carefully. And discovering -- much to their surprise -- that they were off by a significant amount. Then they'll tighten up their logging and start losing again.

It's never going to be 100% accurate. It's not an exact science. But if you have better data, you can make better decisions.

Recipe builder is the bomb. Takes a few minutes to enter everything, but once it's done, it's in there for future use. I use it all the time - and easy to edit if it's a recipe that I change up ingredients on, I can change quantities or specific ingredients easily.

I cook a lot off allrecipes as a lot of their recipes have been uploaded on here and can be searched too.