How to tally calories for homemade meals
 

Hello everyone,
I'm new at this so help me figure this one out. If I make a meal for the entire family like homemade beef and beans soft shell burritos how do I tally the calories for just my serving?
Thanks!

I use fitday to track my calories, so when I make something that is hard to look up (almost always) I do one of two things:

1. I input every item seperately as calculated per serving

or

2. I forward fitday by one day to get a blank page and I add all the ingredients into the screen. Then I divide it by the number of servings and input it as a custom food.

The is also a recipe analyzer on calorie count's website, but it doesn't always have info for ingredients I use. I believe it's under the "tools" heading.

Look up the calories for each ingredient and calculate the total calories in the entire recipe and then divide by the number of servings -- ends up being a lot of math, but I'm afraid there is not really easy method.

The software I use on my Palm device has a 'recipe' function that I can use. Essentially, tho', it tallies all the meal's components, then I divide by the number of servings, or some other appropriate measure, ie volume or weight.

DS has learned to stay out of my way when I'm weighing and measuring components and empty dishes!

Sometimes, I fully calculate the recipe. I track everything in Excel. I have one tab for calculating recipes. So, one column is the item and the next columns are calories, fat and carbs. The bottom row is the total values. The next line is labeled something like "Serving 1/9" and has the total values divided by the number of servings. Then, on the tab where I track my intake, I enter the appropriate entry for my actual portion. If I had two slices and my "serving" was only one, I double it, etc. So, that's what I do when I feel like it.

When I don't feel so ambitious, I google for something similar. In general, I'm not going for a high level of accuracy here. It Google tells me my dinner was 450 calories and it was 550 or 350, that's OK by me. I make most of our meals and breads from scratch, so, after that, I don't always feel like doing the math! :)

There are several websites that will compute the nutritional info for a recipe. You enter all the ingredients and how many servings the recipe came out to, and then the website tells you how many calories are in each serving. Try:

• NutritionData.com
• Fitwatch.com (the free version)
• calorie-count.com

Thank you everyone for all the replies!!