Counting calories when you make a family sized meal.
Cocoa1020
Posts: 197 Member
Years ago I was cooking for my mom and I and it was easy to log my meals. My weightloss calories were the same as her maintance. I could just double the serving size and split it in a half. (I used a scale for accuracy)
Now I moved in with my fiance. And he's a big fit guy who works our and has an active job. Feeding our family of 2 is really like a family of 6 (I make left overs for him for work) I found myself having no idea what the calories were of what I was making.
I recently learned how to calculate the calories in my large meals and know exactly how many calories are in my portion. I wanted to share this with you all 😀 this is especially helpful for rice and pasta and mainly food that has the calories posted before you cook it.
It's helpful if you have a pen/paper ready as you cook
I do everything in grams for accuracy
First weigh your pot. Write that number down
Weigh all the ingredients that you are using.
Once you are done cooking, Weigh your pot again. You can put a small bowl under the pot and set it to 0 so you can see the numbers and not melt your scale.
Take the weight and minus the weight of your pot.
Enter in the recipe in the recipe calculator to get the total amount of calories in your meal.
Now calculate: total calories in pot/weight of food (minus the weight of the pot) x100.
Now you know how many calories are in 100g. Play with the serving size in the recipe builder so the calories match (as close as you can) to 100g. Save that recipe. So now everytime you cook it you can log it easily.
Let's say you made the recipe again, and served yourself 195 grams. Well you can log it as 1.95 servings. 💥
It might be tedious at first, but after some time you will have all your common recipes in MFP and it will make life easier
I'm open to any other ideas about counting calories in large meals.
Now I moved in with my fiance. And he's a big fit guy who works our and has an active job. Feeding our family of 2 is really like a family of 6 (I make left overs for him for work) I found myself having no idea what the calories were of what I was making.
I recently learned how to calculate the calories in my large meals and know exactly how many calories are in my portion. I wanted to share this with you all 😀 this is especially helpful for rice and pasta and mainly food that has the calories posted before you cook it.
It's helpful if you have a pen/paper ready as you cook
I do everything in grams for accuracy
First weigh your pot. Write that number down
Weigh all the ingredients that you are using.
Once you are done cooking, Weigh your pot again. You can put a small bowl under the pot and set it to 0 so you can see the numbers and not melt your scale.
Take the weight and minus the weight of your pot.
Enter in the recipe in the recipe calculator to get the total amount of calories in your meal.
Now calculate: total calories in pot/weight of food (minus the weight of the pot) x100.
Now you know how many calories are in 100g. Play with the serving size in the recipe builder so the calories match (as close as you can) to 100g. Save that recipe. So now everytime you cook it you can log it easily.
Let's say you made the recipe again, and served yourself 195 grams. Well you can log it as 1.95 servings. 💥
It might be tedious at first, but after some time you will have all your common recipes in MFP and it will make life easier
I'm open to any other ideas about counting calories in large meals.
3
Replies
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Good plan! I usually make the servings the same as the number of grams as I find that easier. 733 grams is 733 servings. Then I can just log however many grams I ate1
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Years ago I was cooking for my mom and I and it was easy to log my meals. My weightloss calories were the same as her maintance. I could just double the serving size and split it in a half. (I used a scale for accuracy)
Now I moved in with my fiance. And he's a big fit guy who works our and has an active job. Feeding our family of 2 is really like a family of 6 (I make left overs for him for work) I found myself having no idea what the calories were of what I was making.
I recently learned how to calculate the calories in my large meals and know exactly how many calories are in my portion. I wanted to share this with you all 😀 this is especially helpful for rice and pasta and mainly food that has the calories posted before you cook it.
It's helpful if you have a pen/paper ready as you cook
I do everything in grams for accuracy
First weigh your pot. Write that number down
Weigh all the ingredients that you are using.
Once you are done cooking, Weigh your pot again. You can put a small bowl under the pot and set it to 0 so you can see the numbers and not melt your scale.
Take the weight and minus the weight of your pot.
Enter in the recipe in the recipe calculator to get the total amount of calories in your meal.
Now calculate: total calories in pot/weight of food (minus the weight of the pot) x100.
Now you know how many calories are in 100g. Play with the serving size in the recipe builder so the calories match (as close as you can) to 100g. Save that recipe. So now everytime you cook it you can log it easily.
Let's say you made the recipe again, and served yourself 195 grams. Well you can log it as 1.95 servings. 💥
It might be tedious at first, but after some time you will have all your common recipes in MFP and it will make life easier
I'm open to any other ideas about counting calories in large meals.
Maybe you haven't explained it properly, but this step is incorrect. The only way 100 X the total calories in a pot of food would equal the calories in 100 g of food would be if there were only 1 g of food in the pot.
The method commonly recommended* by users on this site is to enter the net weight of the pot of food (i.e., total weight minus the weight of the pot) in the recipe builder as the number of servings. Then whenever you eat some of that food, you enter the weight of your portion in grams as the number of servings.
*I generally making a serving of the food larger, so I can have a better sense of the nutrients in the dish when I pull up the information in my recipes -- when your serving size is 1 gram, pretty much all nutrients round down to zero in the nutrition information label generated by MFP.2 -
I do this as well since most of my meals are things I'm preparing for more than just myself, using a 1g serving size.
I have also learned to save recipes by category and putting 1g at the end so I can remember that's how the servings are sorted. For example, I usually eat baked oatmeal in the mornings, and the recipe is labelled "Breakfast: Baked Oatmeal 1g." I have enough recipes saved now that if I make something we haven't had in a while, it's much easier to sort alphabetically and find the category I want, rather than comb through page after page and hope I find it (at least on the desktop version of the site.)
I also have a spreadsheet saved (soon to print and put on the back of a cabinet door) that lists the weights of my most commonly used dishes, so if I forget to tare something at the right time or weigh it at the beginning (which does happen) I can look it up and subtract accordingly.
When I put in an entirely new recipe, I will often save it at first with estimations of amounts and servings so I can have a rough idea of how many calories it will be ahead of time (I prelog my food usually the day before.) Then when I actually prepare it I can edit and log the more accurate version.1 -
I wish I would remember to do that when I start. Great idea! Now to get it in place.1
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lynn_glenmont wrote: »Years ago I was cooking for my mom and I and it was easy to log my meals. My weightloss calories were the same as her maintance. I could just double the serving size and split it in a half. (I used a scale for accuracy)
Now I moved in with my fiance. And he's a big fit guy who works our and has an active job. Feeding our family of 2 is really like a family of 6 (I make left overs for him for work) I found myself having no idea what the calories were of what I was making.
I recently learned how to calculate the calories in my large meals and know exactly how many calories are in my portion. I wanted to share this with you all 😀 this is especially helpful for rice and pasta and mainly food that has the calories posted before you cook it.
It's helpful if you have a pen/paper ready as you cook
I do everything in grams for accuracy
First weigh your pot. Write that number down
Weigh all the ingredients that you are using.
Once you are done cooking, Weigh your pot again. You can put a small bowl under the pot and set it to 0 so you can see the numbers and not melt your scale.
Take the weight and minus the weight of your pot.
Enter in the recipe in the recipe calculator to get the total amount of calories in your meal.
Now calculate: total calories in pot/weight of food (minus the weight of the pot) x100.
Now you know how many calories are in 100g. Play with the serving size in the recipe builder so the calories match (as close as you can) to 100g. Save that recipe. So now everytime you cook it you can log it easily.
Let's say you made the recipe again, and served yourself 195 grams. Well you can log it as 1.95 servings. 💥
It might be tedious at first, but after some time you will have all your common recipes in MFP and it will make life easier
I'm open to any other ideas about counting calories in large meals.
Maybe you haven't explained it properly, but this step is incorrect. The only way 100 X the total calories in a pot of food would equal the calories in 100 g of food would be if there were only 1 g of food in the pot.
The method commonly recommended* by users on this site is to enter the net weight of the pot of food (i.e., total weight minus the weight of the pot) in the recipe builder as the number of servings. Then whenever you eat some of that food, you enter the weight of your portion in grams as the number of servings.
*I generally making a serving of the food larger, so I can have a better sense of the nutrients in the dish when I pull up the information in my recipes -- when your serving size is 1 gram, pretty much all nutrients round down to zero in the nutrition information label generated by MFP.
The "/" means divided. Total calories in the pot divided by weight food in grams equal how many calories in 1 gram of food. Then multiply it by 100 to know how many calories are in 100 grams.
You can also cross multiply. Comes out the same.
1 -
penguinmama87 wrote: »I do this as well since most of my meals are things I'm preparing for more than just myself, using a 1g serving size.
I have also learned to save recipes by category and putting 1g at the end so I can remember that's how the servings are sorted. For example, I usually eat baked oatmeal in the mornings, and the recipe is labelled "Breakfast: Baked Oatmeal 1g." I have enough recipes saved now that if I make something we haven't had in a while, it's much easier to sort alphabetically and find the category I want, rather than comb through page after page and hope I find it (at least on the desktop version of the site.)
I also have a spreadsheet saved (soon to print and put on the back of a cabinet door) that lists the weights of my most commonly used dishes, so if I forget to tare something at the right time or weigh it at the beginning (which does happen) I can look it up and subtract accordingly.
When I put in an entirely new recipe, I will often save it at first with estimations of amounts and servings so I can have a rough idea of how many calories it will be ahead of time (I prelog my food usually the day before.) Then when I actually prepare it I can edit and log the more accurate version.
Good strategy! Hey, anything that works amirite 0 -
My biggest issue is forgetting to weigh the pot. But now I have done this so often I have all my weights in a bookcorinasue1143 wrote: »I wish I would remember to do that when I start. Great idea! Now to get it in place.1 -
I use a similar process, but I use the Meal function instead of the recipe builder.
I enter all my ingredients in a meal somewhere in the future. I save the meal, putting the total weight of the finished dish in the title. I divide the weight of my portion by the total weight of the dish and then log that as my portion of the meal in my diary.
It's easy to use an old meal as the basis for creating new meals, tweaking the ingredients, and this method also lets you adapt individual ingredients after they've been added to your diary.1 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »Years ago I was cooking for my mom and I and it was easy to log my meals. My weightloss calories were the same as her maintance. I could just double the serving size and split it in a half. (I used a scale for accuracy)
Now I moved in with my fiance. And he's a big fit guy who works our and has an active job. Feeding our family of 2 is really like a family of 6 (I make left overs for him for work) I found myself having no idea what the calories were of what I was making.
I recently learned how to calculate the calories in my large meals and know exactly how many calories are in my portion. I wanted to share this with you all 😀 this is especially helpful for rice and pasta and mainly food that has the calories posted before you cook it.
It's helpful if you have a pen/paper ready as you cook
I do everything in grams for accuracy
First weigh your pot. Write that number down
Weigh all the ingredients that you are using.
Once you are done cooking, Weigh your pot again. You can put a small bowl under the pot and set it to 0 so you can see the numbers and not melt your scale.
Take the weight and minus the weight of your pot.
Enter in the recipe in the recipe calculator to get the total amount of calories in your meal.
Now calculate: total calories in pot/weight of food (minus the weight of the pot) x100.
Now you know how many calories are in 100g. Play with the serving size in the recipe builder so the calories match (as close as you can) to 100g. Save that recipe. So now everytime you cook it you can log it easily.
Let's say you made the recipe again, and served yourself 195 grams. Well you can log it as 1.95 servings. 💥
It might be tedious at first, but after some time you will have all your common recipes in MFP and it will make life easier
I'm open to any other ideas about counting calories in large meals.
Maybe you haven't explained it properly, but this step is incorrect. The only way 100 X the total calories in a pot of food would equal the calories in 100 g of food would be if there were only 1 g of food in the pot.
The method commonly recommended* by users on this site is to enter the net weight of the pot of food (i.e., total weight minus the weight of the pot) in the recipe builder as the number of servings. Then whenever you eat some of that food, you enter the weight of your portion in grams as the number of servings.
*I generally making a serving of the food larger, so I can have a better sense of the nutrients in the dish when I pull up the information in my recipes -- when your serving size is 1 gram, pretty much all nutrients round down to zero in the nutrition information label generated by MFP.
The "/" means divided. Total calories in the pot divided by weight food in grams equal how many calories in 1 gram of food. Then multiply it by 100 to know how many calories are in 100 grams.
You can also cross multiply. Comes out the same.
Sorry, misread that.0 -
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