It might be easier if I had some sort of scale but I don't have one. I would give anything to know how many calories are in the soup I made. It has 1 medium head of cabbage, one small. 2 zucchinis and 3 squash, 5 small cans of tomato sauce, 4 cups of beef broth, 2 lbs lean hamburger, 1/2 of a large onion, 1 bell pepper, lots garlic and herb seasoning. I guess getting a gram scale is the only way to know how many cals in home cooked items .

The highest calorie items in your soup (the meat, broth, cans of tomato sauce) are easy to count since you gave measurements. I'd just estimate on the rest. Just add up all the ingredient calories up and divide by the number of servings. Websites like calorie-king, fitday, and the daily plate will give counts for the "average" sized veggie.

Although we would all love for calorie counting to be exact, it never really can be. We just have to estimate as best we can. A scale would probably be helpful, but unless you have a lab you can send everything you eat to, nothing will be completely exact.

I have a scale and love it for as close to accurate as possibly counts. Although really with the information you have, you should be able to make a decent estimate to the calories. Yes its not exact but its close.

I got my scale from the dollar store and it works perfectly (accuracy up to about 1/2 an ounce, which is all I need), so it's really no big deal or big cost to get one. Why not, right? If I'm cooking something at home (which isn't that common), I generally either make just my serving or count up calories for every morsel I put into the dish, and divide it by the portion I eat. Seems to work pretty well.

I didn't use a scale all throughout my weight loss. I simply measured raw ingredients going into something, added the calories for each, and divided by the number of servings it was going to be. For example, tonight I am making what we lovingly call "Beefy Bean Mess". It consists of 1.5 cups of dried pinto beans (which I soak in water, then cook with calorie free spices, so the calories stay the same cooked or uncooked), 1 lb of extra (4%) lean ground beef, 6 zucchini, 1 yellow onion, 2 red bell pepper, a serrano chile, a jalapeno, and 1/2 cup of reduced fat cheddar cheese. It will be 4 servings. I enter all of the ingredients into FitDay, with the amount determined as the total/4 servings. So my fitday for today says I ate .375 cup dried pinto beans, 4 ounces raw extra lean ground beef, 1.5 zucchini, half a bell pepper, a quarter each of a serrano, a large onion, and a jalapeno, and .125 cups of cheese. This gives me the calories for a quarter of the dish.

I didn't use a scale to measure anything until very recently, when I was well into maintenance. I'd just measure in cups or, for fruits and veggies, estimate the size. I'd use the weight from my package of meat and divide by the number of portions to get the raw weight of a single portion, and off I'd go.

I track my home made meals through the daily plate. You can create saved meals or add your ingredients separately. I typically create the saved meal with 100% of the ingredients I put in, so I can calculate what percentage my serving was. Then its easy when I have leftovers too.

I use a calorie count book.I love calorie king. You can find it online at www.calorieking.com or I use the book Calorie Fat & Carbohydrate Counter. It has tons of information. There are other good souces at well, sometimes you have to make an estimate but you usually can get pretty close. You could also google calorie counts and get more information than you can ever use.

But when you don't measure or weigh your raw veggies, you cant really count them.

I never weighed, but I do use measuring cups, or as I said, use the guideline "small"/"Medium"/"large" designations in FitDay.

It may not be perfect, but it was close enough to get me to where I am today.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you count all those veggies by description (1/2 lg onion, etc) instead of by exact weight, you will do just fine. I would be careful with higher calorie foods, but with the veggies, it's overkill to let that derail you.

Being wrong by ten or twenty or even fifty percent on raw vegetables isn't what made you fat.

Yeah, veggie calories are pretty forgiving.

The one that I find particularly tricky is when I make turkey or chicken soup - you know, throwing in all the leftover bones & carcass bits, simmering them w/ veggies until the meat falls off, then removing the bones & skimming the fat. I have NO IDEA how to count that, b/c I never really know how much turkey/chicken is still on there, plus I just sort of keep adding water until the consistency is right, so don't even really know how many servings I end up with!

Any ideas on this?

Good question Su-Bee. Canned broth has ~10 calories per cup, but the stuff I make (same way you make it) is so much richer, it must have more calories, including more protein and a little more fat. I'd love to get more info about this.

This is one area where I'm glad I use preportioned foods like frozen veggies and frozen chicken breasts. I know "natural" cooking is better but what's best for a health choice is what I will actually keep up with! So it's pretty simple for me to calculate my meals (and make them, lol).