[Sandi]

I need help from all online calorie counters. I don't care what software your using..Fitday, food dairy, Smart Balance, my question is to you all. How do you do meals? I want to make a casserole and it has 6 eggs, 1 lb of sausge, etc. When I was counting calories and just logging them I could manage to figure out my calories. But Fitday wants all this other info like carbs and fat and stuff. It seems nearly impossible to figure this out for recipes. I bought Mastercook assuming it would do the trick but I am afraid I just wasted $20.00 because I don't think I can do it with that software.

You help is appreciated!!!

[Charles78]

I use myfooddiary and I just enter in all the ingredients and tell it how many servings and it does all the rest.

[chaoskitty]

I had that same problem - so what I did was made a spreadsheet in excel and put down all the ingredient names and heading the columns were calories, fat, and so on. Then I just looked up the ingredients in fitday, added up the columns, divided each column by the amount of servings. That should at least give you a ball park figure for 1 serving.

I hope this helped!

Best, kitty

[DishyFishy]

If all I'm wanting is kcal info, I just look each individual item up in my counter (for the amounts I'm using), add the kcals together, and divide the total by the number of servings I get from the meal.

Edit: I forgot to add that I occasionally use "that unmentionable site" to log food, and when I enter a custom meal, I just enter zeros in everything except the kcal count. Worked well enough for me.

Maybe you can get a refund from Mastercook.

[lucky]

I have mastercook 9 and it allows me to enter all ingredients and the number of servings and it automatically gives me the nutritional information per serving. However, I rarely use it because by the time DH gave it to me I had all of my custom stuff in fitday.

Using fitday, I skip ahead to the next day so that I have a clean slate. I enter each ingredient in the amounts needed for the recipe. The nutritional information for that "day" is the nutritional information for the whole recipe. Then I use the nutritional report to create a custom food. Usually I enter the whole recipe as one serving because I usually don't know how many cups or ounces a whole recipe makes. The next time I make that recipe I just enter the amount that I've eaten (so if there are 4 servings I'll enter that I ate 1/4 of a serving). It sound like a lot of trouble but I've not found it to be. And once it is entered, you never have to do it again!

[Less of Lena]

I think I'm doing the same as Charles. I use FitdayPC.

On the two occasions that I made real, recipe foods (one was home made chicken noodle soup, the other was home made beef stew), I opened up a Custom Food.

Under Custom Food, I opened up the Ingredients tab. Then I input all the ingredients (chick, carrots, stock, noodles, etc). FitdayPC totalled up how many calories were in the pot. Let's say, for example, there were 3,000 calories in the pot.

Then I figured out what one serving would be (1 serving = 1 cup, for example) and figured out how many servings were in the pot. For sake of example, let's say there are 20 cups in the pot.

When I named my new Custom Food, I made sure to put "Serv = 0.05" in the title. That way, when I eat a cup of this delicious soup, I know I've eaten 1/20th (5%) of the total pot! When I enter it on my daily Food Log, I call the serving size 0.05 and it properly records 150 calories!

It sounds more complicated than it really was!

[stacylambert]

That's exactly what I do Lucky! I have like 30 custom foods with all the different meals I make.

It takes a little time at first, but it's much easier in the long run.

[Heather]

nutridiary has something similar to what you are all describing in fitday. You create a meal with your foods. To do portions, duplicate the meal as a proportion of the original (4 servings is .25) and voila! All the nutrition info right there.

I do this a lot for salads too. All the ingrediants I typically use for salads are listed. When I make a new salad, I duplicate an old salad meal, and change the weights of each ingredient -- zeroing out any ingredients not present in the current salad. Voila! new salad with all the nutritional info. It's really fast, and given that I have a big salad at least 2ce a week, very helpful!

[Sandi]

I do not see this option with Fitday when I add a new custom food, do you think I need to buy the PC version to use it?

[Less of Lena]

Yes, I think it may only be on the PC version, JacobsMommy . The online version doesn't show anywhere to input individual ingredients. I think you *could* possibly monkey around with it, but I would think it would be rather time-consuming and convoluted.

[barbygirl43]

I had the same problem with Mastercook Sandi. I finally figured it all out and I enter it all for my recipe,# of servings and then will enter that data for 1 serving into fitday.

[teahoney]

I know I am going totally OT but I want to know what casserole your making that includes a pound of sausage. I think I'm drooling a little.

[buckettgirl]

Sandi, what I did when I made a cassarole was take all the ingredients I was using separately. I would write down the number of servings I used for each ingredient (for instance I used 6 tortillas and each tortilla is a serving) and I wrote down all the nutrition info provided for the serving size and muliplied each value by the number of servings I used for each ingredient. Then I added up the total cals from each ingredient, total fat, carbs etc. Then I divided these amounts by the amount of servings I expected to get out of the dish to get the nutrition info for my serving size. So the cassarole I made had a total of 1500 cals, and I knew we would get about 6 servings from it, so each serving had 250 cal.
It is time consuming, but if you can't find an easier way, this is what I do - it works. I don't know about the Mastercook software, so I can't help ya with that.

[Lesa25]

Well I use sparks.com and all I have to do is put post how much of what I am eating from tbsp, to cups to 1 serving. I like sparks.com I did fitday but, I just couldn't do it anymore. hope you find the site you need.

[Nori71]

I like NutritionData.com for analyzing recipes. It's fairly easy - you search for each food in your recipe and then add it to you "pantry". Once all the foods you need are in your pantry, you put in amounts, enter how many servings the recipe makes and it gives you a very detailed breakdown. I think there's only 2 times they didn't have my ingredients and I had to make a custom entry. I use Nutridiary.com for my daily log, but for some reason I find NutritionData easier for baking/cooking - like when there's 32 slices/pieces or some big number like that. Then I just enter 1 serving of my recipe into my daily log using "custom" foods and I'm set.