Need help with weighing food.

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walker1world
walker1world Posts: 259 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I made a some chilli the other day added a little this and a lot of that. The issue was when I went to get a cup of chilli. I then was unsure how to count the to total calories for the cup. Any suggestion how this works? I am sure it is simple but for some reason I can't get my head around it.

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  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
    edited October 2015
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    Before you start, weigh the pot. Weigh and measure everything as it goes into the pot to record in the MFP recipe builder. When it's done cooking, weight the whole thing and subtract the weight of the pot. That will give you the weight of the whole recipe.

    Let's say that the finished recipe weighs 1248 grams. You can put that into the recipe builder as 12.48 servings (100 grams per serving) for the recipe. If you get out a bowlful that weighs 234 grams, that would be 2.34 servings.
  • Liftng4Lis
    Liftng4Lis Posts: 15,150 Member
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    I input everything into the recipe builder. You weigh each ingredient as you go. For the servings, I start with a generalization of how many I'm going to get and adjust it prior to logging if there are less or more than I anticipated.
  • Queenmunchy
    Queenmunchy Posts: 3,380 Member
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    After weighing your pot, when you're adding your recipe to the recipe builder, make sure you weigh each ingredient as you add it to the pot. "A little of this and a lot of that" is difficult to gauge. 150g onion, 20g olive oil, etc.
    Then you can go ahead with what seska422 said - either make your servings 100g or 1g, then weigh the amount you scoop out.
  • DisneyDude85
    DisneyDude85 Posts: 428 Member
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    seska422 wrote: »
    Before you start, weigh the pot. Weigh and measure everything as it goes into the pot to record in the MFP recipe builder. When it's done cooking, weight the whole thing and subtract the weight of the pot. That will give you the weight of the whole recipe.

    Let's say that the finished recipe weighs 1248 grams. You can put that into the recipe builder as 12.48 servings (100 grams per serving) for the recipe. If you get out a bowlful that weighs 234 grams, that would be 2.34 servings.

    I do it a little different. Lets say whatever I cook is 1500 g total, I put it in as 1500 servings. Then if I eat 123 g, I input it as 123 servings :) Both ways work, just based on preference.

    Unfortunately, OP, you need to stop the "little of this, little of that" mentality. Weigh everything before it goes in the pot/skilliet/what-have-you. It seems tedious now, but once you get the hang of it, it will just be second nature!
  • Eliz_99
    Eliz_99 Posts: 85 Member
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    I'm from the UK and our recipes are usually in grams anyway so I'm used to weighing food if I'm following a recipe. I enter all recipes into the recipe builder by weight of each ingredient then I enter the amount of servings it will be. Then I just divide the meal into the serving sizes but the previous idea sounds better as it's more accurate.
  • katrhearn879
    katrhearn879 Posts: 4 Member
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    I usually add up the calories of all the ingredients then divide by how many servings I want that one pot to provide. I don't use the recipe builder
  • lorrpb
    lorrpb Posts: 11,464 Member
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    My chili pot is way too big to fit on my food scale! LOL
  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
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    lorrpb wrote: »
    My chili pot is way too big to fit on my food scale! LOL
    If I did a lot of cooking, I'd get a second food scale so that I had one for frequent use and one with a higher maximum weight to use for recipes.
  • walker1world
    walker1world Posts: 259 Member
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    Ok I think I figured out what I was missing. Thanks for all the advice. I forgot grams is a unit of measuring of weight so if I weigh each ingredient as I put it in the chilli and ad up all the weight of all those ingredients and then divide by the servings.thanks for your help. .
  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
    edited October 2015
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    walker1world wrote: »
    Ok I think I figured out what I was missing. Thanks for all the advice. I forgot grams is a unit of measuring of weight so if I weigh each ingredient as I put it in the chilli and ad up all the weight of all those ingredients and then divide by the servings.thanks for your help. .
    You weigh everything as it goes in to get overall calories and nutritional information. The weight of the final product will be different from just adding the weights of the uncooked ingredients together due to cooking processes such as evaporation of some of the water. That's why you need to weigh the whole thing after it is cooked in order to get a weight that you can use for servings.

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