Is there a method to set a serving by amount?

davekstl
davekstl Posts: 2 Member
in Recipes
So I make a pot of chili or stew. myFitnessPal allows me to create a recipe but it wants the serving size. So I guess not real accurate or I could empty the pot and use a measuring cup...not conveinet....so is there a method using the recipe and have it determine the calories etc. by cups? So given the recipe, can it calculate the total size of the pot of whatever and say the pot has this many cups at this nutrition value?

Replies

  • kiwilimeade
    kiwilimeade Posts: 14 Member
    I don't think that's possible. When we make our own recipe, MFP doesn't know how we cook the meal. When we cook something, especially soups and chilis, water evaporates. That changes the weight and volume of the total dish, so MFP can't accurately count calories per cup or cups per dish even though you've input the ingredients because MFP doesn't know how much you cooked down the chili.
  • The313
    The313 Posts: 3,145 Member
    I do it 3 different ways depending on how accurate I care to be / if I'm the only one eating it.

    Most accurate:
    You can weigh the finished pot of soup if you have a nice big food scale. Subtract the weight of the pot once you empty it. Then you can weigh each bowl of soup you're going to eat to find how many calories in each bowl. If my soup weighs 200 oz total, I like to make a serving size one oz so I can easily weight and enter it.

    Kinda accurate: Scoop your first bowl with the measuring cup, and then when storing the rest, scoop with the measuring cup or store in tupperware with approx cup size labels. Kinda like what you mentioned above.

    Easiest:
    If you're the only one eating it, just make it one serving. If I know I'm going to eat it for the next 5 days, I'll just log one fifth of a serving each day. Each day won't be as accurate but it will even out at the end of the week.
  • goal06082021
    goal06082021 Posts: 2,130 Member
    I set the serving size to the number of grams of finished dish (or 10g, or 100g, if the math works out). So, for a 2000g pot of chili, I might set the servings to 2000 (1 serving = 1 g), or 20 (1 serving = 100g), and then log how much I actually eat accordingly (e.g., a 500g bowl of chili is logged as either 500 servings or 5 servings, depending on how I set the servings in the recipe). It looks a little wild at first to be logging 500 servings of something, but the math checks out.
  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,488 Member
    I weigh everything by grams because it's easier to count.

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  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 978 Member
    I set the number of servings to the number of servings I'm making. So, if my soup or salad is lunch for the next 3 days, that's three servings and I log one per day. I'm not usually so fussy about whether each serving is equal. When I make a curry or bolognese or Shepherds pie or whatever, that will mostly go into the freezer, I divide my finished pot between 4 or 6 containers, make sure they're equal weight, and set the Recipe to be 4 or 6 servings or whatever.

    Very very rarely, I'll log the total weight, in grams, as the number of servings - then, when I log it, I enter how many grams I serve myself. I normally only do this if I make a loaf of bread.
  • SuzanneC1l9zz
    SuzanneC1l9zz Posts: 451 Member
    Strudders67 wrote: »
    Very very rarely, I'll log the total weight, in grams, as the number of servings - then, when I log it, I enter how many grams I serve myself. I normally only do this if I make a loaf of bread.

    Thank you for this! I make my own bread and have been trying to figure out how to log it. It's not like every slice is going to be the same like in a store-bought pre-sliced loaf.

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