I didn't even know these existed before a couple weeks ago when someone mentioned a website where they could plug in ingredients and get a summary of the nutrition information per serving. I couldn't remember the one that person mentioned, so I did a web search today. I found a site called Calorie-Count.com, and the great thing about it is that you can just write in ingredients. You don't have to locate and plug in each ingredient separately. I could just write my banana fritter recipe in a box as:
2 eggs
7 bananas
2 tablespoons oil
etc...
...And it interpreted and calculated everything! How easy! Then, I just plugged the results into fitday under a new custom heading! This is great for recipes made from scratch!!!
You don't have to log on...you can just click on "recipe analysis" to start.
Maybe everyone already knows about this stuff, but it's amazing to me!
That is a great feature! I've used calorie-count.com many times but didn't know about this. Sometimes it can be really hard to get an accurate calorie count so this really simplifies things. I just tried it and it allows you to enter say the entire weight of a package of meat, plus all of your side dishes (e.g. 1 cup of rice, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 can of pink beans) and then divide that total by the number of servings that will be created. Some of us already do this, but the HARD way. Thanks!
Tara, I can't thank you enough!!!!! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for!!!!
I went on the website and it was soooo easy and quick. Thank you again, you have saved me so much time and stopped me from wondering about sooo many things that I make. I will be using it very often. What a great tool to have!
Forgot to mention that the button to click on for "recipe analysis" is about halfway down the web page in case anyone doesn't see it.
I've been plugging in some of my family's homemade ethnic food recipes, and it's great to know the nutritional info! Some stuff just ain't on fitday! It's nice to be exact!
It's under "New" on the website, so maybe it's brand new!
The greatest thing since sliced bread, as they say!!!
Thanks, Tara--that really helps! I saw a recipe yesterday and it didn't come with the calories per serving, so I ended up doing it in Fitday and it took forever! I'm going to put it in this new site and see how much easier it is.
I Hate to rain on everyone's parade but I put a recipe from my Weight Watchers cookbook through to it for Hummus. I wanted to see how accurate the Calorie-Counter was, they said one serving had 23 calories in it and W.W. Cookbook said one serving has 91 calories. I put the exact ingredients in too. I use the nutrients section on fitday and I don't know how you would transfer the nutrient information from Cal-Counter over to the Fitday other than typing it in manually. Too much work! Anyone else tested out a recipe to see if it comes out?
Yeah it's not giving me very accurate counts either. I put in something that said 6 eggs, and the whole recipe was off, so i did a "details" click on the eggs, and it said 386 calories. But then if you put it down to 1 egg, it said 74 calories. Well, 74x6 = 444, not 386. Weird.
If they fix up the bugs, this would be an AWESOME tool, though!
Maybe this is what happened with the eggs? I put in one large egg, and then tried it with 6 large eggs, and it did the math correctly. It looks like they have a number of calorie counts for eggs depending on the size of the egg. Did you specify the size in both trials? It seems to automatically do medium eggs if you don't specifically say the size. Maybe that accounts for the difference? If you just wrote 6 eggs, it would do the math for medium ones (65 calories each), and not for large ones (74 calories each). 6 medium eggs comes out at about 390, when 6 large would be the 444. I would make sure you specify the size, and see if it works out better (if that's the issue).
Bobbolink: I've noticed that if you put in an ingredient that it doesn't recognize that it will just eliminate it from the calculation. Sounds like this might have happened to you. Look at the list of ingredients in the bottom right corner of the screen under the nutrition info. All the ingredients should have a green flag. If there is a yellow or red flag, it didn't understand the entry. I would try to enter the info more clearly or in a different way (sometimes it seems to be the way that the ingredient was written) and try again. Definitely check the flags...I think an ingredient may have been left out in your situation. That's the only thing I could think of to account for the calorie discrepancy. I've just found this out via trial and error -- it happened to me!
Hopefully, this and the above post will explain the problems the two of you have had! It seems to be working well for me so far!
LOL, I also thought a meal I had entered was really low in calories but I was still taking the analyzer's word for it. After reading the posts, I realized that many of my ingredients had not been added in so I re-worked most of my entries (changed cubed steak to beef, changed 1 can corn to 12 oz corn, changed I Can't Believe Its Not Butter to 1 tablespoon butter). Once I changed my entries to something recognizable to the analyzer, my per serving meal went up from 270 to 684 (LOL!). Oh well, at least it looks like it still works! Phew..because I was really psyched about this calorie counters forum "find".
GREAT and EASY recipe calorie-counter!
