Best way to determine calories for home made meals

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EATherrian
EATherrian Posts: 4 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I made a slow cooker pot roast with carrot and onions but I'm not sure how best to determine calories for it when I eat a dish. Any ideas?

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  • IllustriousBee
    IllustriousBee Posts: 70 Member
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    I got a great suggestion on here, and it's what I've been doing ever since. You can build recipes on here and save them. You just go to the recipes tab under the food tab. I weigh and add the ingredients and add them to the recipe, then pick however many servings the whole thing is and save it. Then I can log it as just one serving of "pot roast" or whatever the recipe is. Adding recipes is a bit time consuming, but it's not too bad. It's also not 100% accurate since it is highly unlikely that you get exactly 1/4 if the serving size was 4, but it's close enough for me.
  • goal06082021
    goal06082021 Posts: 2,130 Member
    edited July 2021
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    +1 suggestion to use the recipe builder.

    I keep a little notepad and pen right next to my kitchen scale and note down ingredient weights as I prep them. Then I weigh the finished dish and use that to determine serving size. (I took the time recently to weigh all my pots and pans and write down how much they weigh empty, so all I need to do is subtract that from the weight of the finished dish + the container it's in.)

    Like if I made some pot roast and I wanted it to yield six servings, I'd divide the weight of the finished dish by six, and then weigh out portions of that much into six containers.

    The other way to do it, if you're not going to split it up evenly into X number of servings, is to weigh the finished dish and use the weight in grams as the number of servings (so, if you made 2500 grams of pot roast, it'd be 2500 servings), then weigh out your portion and log that number of servings in the diary (e.g. a 250g portion would be 250 servings). Looks a little weird to see 250 servings of something, but the math checks out.
  • wilson10102018
    wilson10102018 Posts: 1,306 Member
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    The only time i use cups as a measurement is with soup and stews. I use the recipe builder as noted above then measure the finished product and set the servings as the number of cups in the finished product. then when I serve it, I use 1 cup as 1 serving. That is about as accurate as it is going to get.
  • EATherrian
    EATherrian Posts: 4 Member
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    Wow, I can do all the ingredients and divide it into a number of servings, that is very useful.
  • penguinmama87
    penguinmama87 Posts: 1,158 Member
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    Honestly, I am a huge advocate of using the recipe builder as several posters have described (rather than setting a number of servings I use total weight), but I don't use that method for pot roast, at least not for how I typically make it. MFP has a data set from the USDA and I use that, because the carrots, onions, liquids and spices only have a negligible influence on calories in the meat, and when I serve it I'm choosing what to eat, rather than it being a relatively uniform dish like a soup, stew, or casserole would be.

    I just searched "chuck roast" and came up with these options: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/?query=chuck roast

    I use the "SR Legacy" tab because those items are directly in the MFP database. There's 65 options here, so it can be a little daunting, but pick the one that most closely resembles what you've got and you can just weigh that directly. For the carrots, I would also weigh those directly and find an entry like "Carrots, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt" because the fact that they've been cooking in beef broth rather than water isn't going to substantially affect their calories - and I don't worry about sodium intake so it doesn't really matter what I pick there. I also use this method for meats that have been marinated, or for roasted vegetables - there I add a teaspoon of oil to my diary when I eat it. Do I eat precisely a teaspoon? Probably less, to be honest. But it's not worth it to me to save and search through and later edit recipes with only two or three ingredients. I already have over 100 saved for other stuff that is more complicated, so this works closely enough for my purposes.

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