Calories in fitness pal recipes

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ayishamuneer1947
ayishamuneer1947 Posts: 2 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Can anyone tell me, calories in fitness pal recipes are per portion or for the whole thing? For example a recipe says 450 calories serves 4. Does that mean 450 calories in the whole 4 portions or per portion??

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  • herblovinmom
    herblovinmom Posts: 352 Member
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    I’m pretty sure it’s per serving. The recipe makes 4 servings. Nutrition info for each serving.
  • Revealme
    Revealme Posts: 10 Member
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    I would think it's per serving.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,461 Member
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    It depends on where you’re pulling the recipe from.

    I’ve got a number of public recipes entered that show as one serving but are actually six. I enter them that way because I consistently make six servings at a time so log them as .17 servings.

    I’ve got a lasagna recipe stored in MFP as one serving that’s 12,000+ calories but makes 24 servings. How are you going to know how many servings I planned on?

    By the same token, if I search “chocolate cake” in MFP, I’ll find people who’ve somehow managed to put in “24 calories per slice” or some nonsense like that.

    You’ve got to be cautious where you’re pulling your data from. I would be very hesitant to use recipes or generic entries stored in the database without verifying the calories.

    Same way with using popular recipe sites. I’ve found really inaccurate calorie calculations on many sites, even Allrecipes. IMHO, a lot of bloggers falsify calorie calculations to lure people in, too.

    Trust but verify.

  • TanyaHooton
    TanyaHooton Posts: 249 Member
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    I'm not sure whether you're referring to some recipes that MyFitnessPal posts (do they do that?) or just random recipes found in the food search catalog. If it's the latter, I never trust those. Here's what I do instead.

    When I make food, which is pretty often, I do this whole process of weighing everything, and write all the numbers in a notebook so I can input them into MFP. I weigh the pan/pot/container while it's empty. Then I weigh all ingredients. Everything: onions, cheese, butter, beef/chicken broth, mushrooms, everything. The only things I don't weigh are 1) meat bought at the meat counter in the store, because it's already weighed by them before it's packaged, 2) some liquids, because instead of weighing I can get accurate enough using cups or tablespoons, 3) a single leaf of lettuce because it's like 3 calories and possibly some celery because it's hard to even eat more than 20 or 25 calories of it. I write them all down. When it's done cooking, I weigh the pan/pot/container full of food. I take this larger number and subtract the weight of the empty pan/pot/container. For example, if my pot weighs 811 grams empty and 2311 full of food, the difference is 1500. That means this recipe has 1500 servings, probably at 1 or 2 calories each.

    Then I scoop it out of the pan onto my plate, which is also on the scale at 0. If the amount I scoop out is 300 grams and MFP has calculated that 1 serving is 2 calories each, that means what I put on my plate is 600 calories.

    It's kind of a pain in the *kitten*. I have to be disciplined. I have to remember to write down everything as I go. I have to type it all in MFP, if it's a new recipe. If it's an existing recipe, I have to edit it for this particular time, because maybe I changed the recipe to add bell pepper or had to use half-and-half instead of milk. But I want my calories to be exact as possible because I don't have much cushion and I want to squeeze every last calorie I can get instead of guessing and being wildly over when I'm really not.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,900 Member
    edited July 2023
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    ayishamuneer1947 wrote: »
    Can anyone tell me, calories in fitness pal recipes are per portion or for the whole thing? For example a recipe says 450 calories serves 4. Does that mean 450 calories in the whole 4 portions or per portion??

    As written, it means 450 calories per serving. Am I going to trust that? No. I'm going to enter the recipe in the recipe builder and use the grams method for servings:
    TanyaHooton wrote: »
    I'm not sure whether you're referring to some recipes that MyFitnessPal posts (do they do that?) or just random recipes found in the food search catalog. If it's the latter, I never trust those. Here's what I do instead.

    When I make food, which is pretty often, I do this whole process of weighing everything, and write all the numbers in a notebook so I can input them into MFP. I weigh the pan/pot/container while it's empty. Then I weigh all ingredients. Everything: onions, cheese, butter, beef/chicken broth, mushrooms, everything. The only things I don't weigh are 1) meat bought at the meat counter in the store, because it's already weighed by them before it's packaged, 2) some liquids, because instead of weighing I can get accurate enough using cups or tablespoons, 3) a single leaf of lettuce because it's like 3 calories and possibly some celery because it's hard to even eat more than 20 or 25 calories of it. I write them all down. When it's done cooking, I weigh the pan/pot/container full of food. I take this larger number and subtract the weight of the empty pan/pot/container. For example, if my pot weighs 811 grams empty and 2311 full of food, the difference is 1500. That means this recipe has 1500 servings, probably at 1 or 2 calories each.

    Then I scoop it out of the pan onto my plate, which is also on the scale at 0. If the amount I scoop out is 300 grams and MFP has calculated that 1 serving is 2 calories each, that means what I put on my plate is 600 calories.

    It's kind of a pain in the *kitten*. I have to be disciplined. I have to remember to write down everything as I go. I have to type it all in MFP, if it's a new recipe. If it's an existing recipe, I have to edit it for this particular time, because maybe I changed the recipe to add bell pepper or had to use half-and-half instead of milk. But I want my calories to be exact as possible because I don't have much cushion and I want to squeeze every last calorie I can get instead of guessing and being wildly over when I'm really not.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,995 Member
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    I weigh the pan/pot/container while it's empty........snip........ When it's done cooking, I weigh the pan/pot/container full of food.

    just a small add on to this - you can save little bit of time by recording weight of all your regularly used pots - and write on underneath in permanant texta or have list stuck on inside of kitchen cupboard door or similar.
  • csplatt
    csplatt Posts: 1,013 Member
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    Do you mean you entered your own recipe and got a calorie total? Or do you mean you looked up entries for things like “homemade lasagna” or “chicken salad”? If the latter, I wouldn’t trust or use it at all because there’s no way to know what ingredients and portion of ingredients were used.

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