Estimating/measuring calories in homecooked meals?
Here's a question that's been bothering me. How do you measure the calories in a homecooked meal that you throw together (so you're not using a recipe from a cookbook that might include the nutritional stats - many don't, anyway)?
For example, I make a chicken stew with veggies and about 1/4 c. peanut butter for thickness, plus chicken brother, spices, etc. I honestly don't know how to measure a serving. I would have to measure each ingredient, add it all up, estimate the number of servings, etc. It seems so complicated. Do you all go to those lengths, or do you attempt to only eat things that you can measure exactly such as 4 oz. chicken, 1/3 c. rice, 1 c. steamed veggies?
I was thinking of making a healthy chilli, using lean ground beef, black beans, canned tomatoes, etc., but again the thought of figuring out the calories in it seems daunting.
Last edited by grammargirl20; 04-15-2009 at 12:21 PM.
Do the math (which is a pain, but if you write it all down, you only have to do it once, for each recipe).
You can eat only foods easily counted foods.
Or you can estimate. Estimating isn't an ideal solution, but it can work fairly well. Basically, trial and error (results on the scale) will tell you if you have a talent for estimation, or not.
I measure and log in software/online: I use a combination of DietPower and sparkpeople.com. As soon as the meal is made I put it in individual serving size plastic pots ready for freezing (I live alone, this makes it easier) and this gives me the number of servings.
I'm not a good estimator; for example, 1/4c peanut butter is 379 calories and that's a bit amount to miscalculate.
I add up all the ingredients and then divide by how much of the food I ate. I can pretty easily mentally divide up the pot to take, say, 1/4 of it, or 1/6 of it.
I did recently make a huge pot of black bean & rice salad, which I went through the pain of actually then measuring out how many cups of salad it ultimately made. I decided that a portion would be 1 cup, and just took it from there.
I save all ingredient containers, weigh all veggies on my digital scale and write that down, then sit with my puter, pen and paper and work it all while the soup is simmering or casserole is baking
I don't count anymore, and I love that freedom. But, I highly recommend doing it for a while at first (and of course, many find they need to always do it, whatever works for you). When I started eating healthy, one of the main things was to starting cooking my own food, so I understand! It *is* a little bit of trouble, I think it helps to just acknowledge that up front and recognize that it's worth it. But it's not that bad.
It helped that at first I rotated through a half dozen or so recipes, so many nights I didn't have to refigure anything. But I used FitDay, and just entered all the ingredients for say, my minestrone, and then created a new custom food with those nutritional values. I was only cooking for myself, so I just knew how many portions I could make out of that pot of soup, and divided the total by that for single serving data. If you're serving a family, and everyone's taking different amounts, you'd need to measure the total volume you make, and then define, say, 1 cup as a portion, and then measure what you take.
If you get creative every night, you have to choose between the work of entering each new recipe (and really, you get into a rhythm with a little practice, and it goes quickly), or you accept estimating as good enough.
I'm not sure FitDay is the best for this sort of thing though. Because you have to enter the new custom recipe by hand (maybe there's another free service that lets you enter all the ingredients and then generates the new custom food for you from that list). I have MasterCook, which does this for me, but it's not free.
It seems I either have to continue estimating or just suck it up and measure and count all the ingredients. I might give FitDay a try. I really don't try that many new recipes. Most nights we have chicken or lean beef/pork, veggies, rice or cous-cous, which is easy to measure. I do cook for a family, so it's a little more complicated than cooking just for yourself.
Math. Honestly I tend to double check my recipes anyway. I have a whole cook book of low cal recipes but they call for things like 1 cup of milk without specificy whole, 2% or skim. And they never give the approximate calories of the individual ingredients. On short cutty thing I do though is have do a group measurement for low call veggies. If a medium squash is 30 then about that much zuchinni or pepper or any other mostly water non startch veggie should be about the same so I eye ball that.
I always measure the amount of servings in whatever I make. For example, tonight I'm making mushroom asparagus in a peanut sauce with 2 cups of asparagus, 1 cup of mushrooms, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Me and my mom will be sharing it so I just cut everything I'm using in half and log it that way. My fitday log reads 1 cup asparagus, 1/2 cup mushrooms, 1/2 tablespoon peanut butter, etc.
I add up all the ingredients and then divide by how much of the food I ate. I can pretty easily mentally divide up the pot to take, say, 1/4 of it, or 1/6 of it.
I do this a lot. Sometimes I mentally divide it (a one-pot dinner) and with other things (chicken-grape salad for a couple days' lunches) I physically divide it and separate my portions in the fridge like that after making it.
It's not that bad, really, because I guess I don't cook up something new on the fly a lot :-) I have a section of my weight loss notebook for caloric lists, so the next time I make broccoli soup I'm not going to figure out my share all over again.
I like Sparkspeople for tracking, I can add my own recipe (called food grouping) and then log that I ate .25 of the pot. I cook just about everything from scratch.
I am going to go out on a limb and say something, and you can think I am a total snot for doing so...if that is the case, Im sorry. But I really think it needs to be said, and someone said the same thing to me and set me strait.
This is not easy.....no quick fixes. So YES, you have to "suck it up" and spend the time to track groups of foods sometimes. BUT you are WORTH IT, it is such a small investment when we are talking about our health here!
Working out is a Bear for me, but I know I have to Suck it up and just do it....I HATE IT, I would rather do the dishes.....and bathe the cats! thats how much I hate it.
But we have to allow ourselves the TIME, and the EFFORT to transform ourselves into a healthy person, physically and mentally!
I also really like SparkPeople. When I make casseroles I will use a knife to divide the pan into how many servings that the recipe has called for and make sure that I take just one serving. Unless of course I have room in my daily calories for more.
I am going to look into that Dietpower site mentioned above. I like to compare the calculations.
Estimating/measuring calories in homecooked meals?
