Calculating Macros for a Homemade Meal

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laurenbastug
laurenbastug Posts: 307 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've been tracking macros for a good amount of time and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. But I realize, I am relying a lot on raw/pre-packaged/overall simple foods and meals because they're easiest to track. And in general, I don't necessarily have an issue with that. But I'm finding I'm avoiding homemade meals/recipes since tracking them can be a pain in the *kitten*.

I know the basics - like if I were to make a turkey chili, I would need to add all the ingredients into the recipe maker but would it then make sense to weight the final meal to get a total amount of grams and then use the grams as the number of servings - then based how much i eat, track that as the serving size? I always get thrown off with the raw vs. cooked thing too though.

Example: I track ground turkey meat, black beans, red peppers, chili seasoning and cheddar cheese as the ingredients . After cooking, I see that the total amount of the food I made was 500g. Is it safe to say that I could then enter 500 as the number of servings, then when I go to eat it and spoon out 50g, I would just enter 50 as the serving size?

In the above example though, would I have to actually track "cooked" ground turkey since I'm technically tracking it in it's "cooked" state?

Sorry if this is a dumb questions/has an obvious answer - on cutting cals and it's a Friday afternoon.

Replies

  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,565 Member
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    If your scale has a high enough capacity (many will go up to 11 pounds...mine unfortunately doesn't), you can weigh the chili after it's cooked to get a total weight. Make sure you know how much the pot/dish weighs before you start it so you can subtract that amount.
  • crabbybrianna
    crabbybrianna Posts: 344 Member
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    Your final product won’t weigh the same as the raw ingredients, so you can’t enter the pre-cooked weight as the final servings. I weigh my pot before cooking, and then weigh everything after to get a final weight.
  • laurenbastug
    laurenbastug Posts: 307 Member
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    Got it - okay thanks both!

    I would just enter the food as cooked if I’m weighing it after.
  • zilkah
    zilkah Posts: 207 Member
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    I do it as 500 servings like you mentioned then just enter in g for each time I eat
  • livingleanlivingclean
    livingleanlivingclean Posts: 11,751 Member
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    Use raw/pre cooked weighed and measured entries for individual components to get the calorie information for the total meal.

    Weigh the prepared food once cooked, use the grams as the number of serves to enter in to the recipe builder, and use this to determine how many calories in your portion. (ie,you eat 200g, you enter 200 x 1g serves)

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