Accurate calorie counts for food

AlexBoBalex79
AlexBoBalex79 Posts: 99 Member
edited August 2018 in Health and Weight Loss
I like to cook so most of our meals are homemade. I’m having a hard time reconciling calorie counts that I find on my fitness pal, believing they are true. For example, I made a homemade chicken soup. It’s a whole chicken, carrots, onions, celery, tomato and corn. Nothing gourmet but quite delicious! It makes a huge pot. When I want to enter in my calorie count on the diary it says one cup only has 80 cal, another one is around 100 cal which I find that very hard to believe. How do you know what to choose in the diaries? I really would expect a bowl of chicken soup to be closer to 300.

Replies

  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,562 Member
    Enter all the ingredients in the recipe builder. That way you know what's in it unlike database entries.
  • AlexBoBalex79
    AlexBoBalex79 Posts: 99 Member
    I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    You need to use the recipe builder. How would the database know what was in your chicken soup vs some random person's entry for their chicken soup which is what those generic entries are. Use the database for individual food items and ingredients, not recipes. Build your own recipe.
  • AlexBoBalex79
    AlexBoBalex79 Posts: 99 Member
    OK, so I'm now trying to add it in the recipes. I used 1 whole chicken. It was 3 lbs. The builder lists many different whole chickens, I selected "Chicken, whole chicken". Now it's asking me how many servings at how many 4 ounce servings. So, 3*16=48/4(oz) - 12. Plus my other ingredients, it came out to 272 cals if it's 12 servings. Much better than the 80 it was predicting.
  • AlexBoBalex79
    AlexBoBalex79 Posts: 99 Member
    Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.
  • kami3006
    kami3006 Posts: 4,979 Member
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

    He can view your diary and copy the meal over to his then adjust the servings if needed.
  • AlexBoBalex79
    AlexBoBalex79 Posts: 99 Member
    kami3006 wrote: »
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

    He can view your diary and copy the meal over to his then adjust the servings if needed.

    Thank you!
  • missysippy930
    missysippy930 Posts: 2,577 Member
    Recipe builder.
  • srk369
    srk369 Posts: 256 Member
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

    If you are creating it on a desktop, there is an option to make it public. I don't always do that though, so I'll take a screen capture of the final nutrition for say 100g and then make a new food item, enter the nutrition values and then name it with my name in the title and give that exact name to my husband...example "Fried Rice - (100g) Stacie's"...then he will search on that.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

    I don't use servings in the conventional sense - I use total grams for recipe (subtract weight of pot). Then a serving = the amount of grams I ate.

    I have a notebook with the weights of all my pots and pans and a scale that weighs up to 11 pounds, which works for everything but the dutch oven when it's filled with gumbo.

    There are kitchen scales which will weigh up to 50 pounds, but that's definitely more than I need.
  • livingleanlivingclean
    livingleanlivingclean Posts: 11,751 Member
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

    I think a bigger headache and time waster would be using random entries that aren't accurate and not achieving my goals because I wasn't logging properly...

    Once you get in to the swing of things, logging becomes less time consuming.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,093 Member
    edited August 2018
    srk369 wrote: »
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    Sorry for the million questions. My husband is also logging- how do I share this recipe with him so he can log it too? We are mfp friends, not sure if that will help.

    If you are creating it on a desktop, there is an option to make it public. I don't always do that though, so I'll take a screen capture of the final nutrition for say 100g and then make a new food item, enter the nutrition values and then name it with my name in the title and give that exact name to my husband...example "Fried Rice - (100g) Stacie's"...then he will search on that.

    Does that actually work now? I haven't tried it in a while, because they used to ask all kinds of questions for categorizing the recipe and want you to input directions, and then it said that they hadn't actually implemented that feature yet and were just trying to build up enough shared recipes to be able to roll out the feature.


    *ETA: I just checked, and they still haven't implemented the recipe-sharing feature. This is the message you get if you say you want to share (plus a lot of fields to fill in):



    We are currently accepting submissions to the MyFitnessPal recipe database. Once we receive enough submissions, we'll create a recipe section where users can browse recipes submitted by other members. To submit your recipe to the database, please provide the following additional information.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,943 Member
    edited August 2018
    AlexBoBalex79 wrote: »
    I think that is what hindered me last time I did my fitness pal. Since I cook so much and I use many ingredients ( this was a very simple soup ) I am doing a lot of entering and recipe building, which takes up a lot of time. Also, I honest to goodness wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many servings are in my gigantic pot of soup. I guess for accuracy sake I’ll do the recipe builder but boy it is time consuming and a headache .

    It doesn't really. I do cook with lots of ingredients as well and it doesn't take long. I even change the amounts of ingredients while cooking to fit my goal. Say I make white rice with crispy mince.

    The mince goes portioned into the freezer, thus I know it's 100gr unless there's a different number on the bag. I put the pot of my rice cooker on the scale, tar, weigh out 80gr, add water, switch it on.

    clean various vegetables, put on scale one by one, log, cut
    Put oil bottle on scale, tar, oil in pan, weight. Stir fry veggies and log in the meantime.

    Spring onion, on scale, log, cut in small rings
    put small mortar on scale, tar, weight out sesame seeds, log, crush
    peel garlic, put on scale, log, cut

    veggies out of pan, add a bit more oil after weighing, crisp up mince with spring onions and sesame seeds and garlic. Grab soy sauce, measure in cup, from there into pan. stir, log. Grab pot of something fermented, on scale and tar, spoonful into pan, stir, log.

    Serve with something pickled, after weighing and logging.

    it sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't. There's just the very quick step of going from cutting board to pan via scale, which takes 2-5 seconds extra depending on if I log right away or while cooking. Doesn't take more time at all. And as I've used all those ingredients before they come up first on my phone when searching. For broccoli I just type Br and it's already there.

    Is it more difficult? Not really! I'm simply not able to cook with more than one pot at the same time, but I still manage to weigh and log while cooking.

    So with 12 ingredients we're looking at a longer cooking time of about 1 minute.

    And servings per pot: you know how much calories are in the same pot. You probably have an idea how many people you want to feed for how long. So that's easy. 12 meals? Just go to your stored meals and add 0.083 (1/12 - btw, does the recipe builder take decimals?) and you have your serving. Or weigh out the whole pot (weigh pot empty beforehand) and then weigh your serving.

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