logging question

dydn11402
dydn11402 Posts: 106 Member
in Food and Nutrition

if i am cooking a big pot of something, lets say a stew in a crockpot, how do i set it up so that i can take out any amount and weigh it/measure it to see how many calories are in the serving i took out? when i try to log the recipe into mfp i can measure everything i put in and see the amount of calories in the entire pot but it asks how many servings are in the pot and i actually have no idea. i want to be able to measure all the ingredients going in and then be able to take out any amount and see the calorie count of what i took out (without knowing how many servings are in the pot beforehand). is there a way to do this?

Best Answers

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,790 Member
    Answer ✓

    Ok, it's slightly more involved, but totally possible. Weight the weight of the empty pot and note it down. Cook your meal, logging all ingredients as you go along. Now you have the weight of all ingredients. But as you cook it water evaporations and the weight changes. So weight the meal including the pot and substract the weight of the pot. Now you know how much is inside. Save the whole dish as a meal and mark it as having the same number of servings as the weight in grams.

    Say you have 945g meal with pot minus 300g pot only = 645g meal. So you save this as 645 servings. If you want to eat from it you can put your empty bowl on the scale, hit TAR to zero the scale, put food in and log as many servings as the scale says in grams.

    An easier way, if you're the only one eating from this: You know your full meal has, say 2500kcal. You want meals worth 500kcal. So you know you can eat 5x from it. Just take out approximately 1/5. sure, it'll be a bit more on some days, or a bit less, but it will even out after 5 meals.

    And third option, with a bit more guesswork: You know how many calories are in the pot. One other person is eating from it. You take 2 big ladles, the other person takes 3. Leftover is approximately half. So you had about 2/10 or 1/5 of the whole pot. I lost most of the weight I wanted to lose this way for dinner, and making the best guess possible at the office canteen, plus weighing and logging all extras.

  • dydn11402
    dydn11402 Posts: 106 Member
    Answer ✓

    thank you! im going to give your first strategy a try. i often cook meals for my family and i tend to just eat something else because i couldnt track that meal accurately enough so this can be a gamechanger for me. really appreciate you taking the time!

Answers

  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 1,064 Member

    I mostly follow the middle option, but I'm just cooking for myself and bag up the excess to go into the freezer. My bolognese & chilli recipes will typically give me 8 portions. If I was cooking for the family, I'd probably follow option 1 as well and weigh / log my portion of the overall dish.

  • LisaMoxon155
    LisaMoxon155 Posts: 300 Member

    Im making a lot of slow cooked meals at the mintue. It's just me and my husband, so I know a full stew pot makes four portions. We eat two and I freeze two.

    So I get two bowls for us to eat at that moment it's ready and 2 small pots and put one ladel in each bowl until all used up. The calories are all calculated using the recipe section on the app. And all approx.

    But like with all foods IMO the calories are not exact. The amount of times I've had a packet of something that tells me xxx amount calories for that weight and it's weighed more or less.

  • mummypigmfp
    mummypigmfp Posts: 5 Member

    I generally follow the first option. I may well serve myself a portion as per the recipe yet not eat all of it. In which case I weigh the leftover, so I can record how much I've actually eaten.

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