Figuring out Calorie Counts
 

Hey Guys!

I'm pretty new to the board and since I'm actively watching my calories I guess I fall into the calorie counting category! :)

I find I'm struggling with keeping track of my dinner calories. Lunch and breakfast are no problem because usually these meals are a patch work of different things that are easy to throw together and tally up.

But, when it comes to dinner, we tend to eat more complicated meals, healthy ones but ones that require more ingredients and I'm finding it hard to calculate how many calories are in a serving. Heck, I'm even having a hard time figuring out what a serving size is.

For dinner last night, I reheated a batch of frozen minestrone soup that I had made last week. The basic ingredients included chick peas, black beans, white beans, potato, carrot, tomatoes and kale. I added 1/4 cup of dry orzo pasta to it and called it a meal.

How would I go about calculating the calories in this type of meal??? :?: Any suggestions from more experienced counters?

Thanks a bunch!!!!

If I don't know the ingredients I generally just google "calories for x" and come up with a lot of different counts I can average together to get an approximate :)

It's worked for me throughout my weight loss and now as I'm maintaining. I know you don't get an exact number that way, but it's better than blindly guessing and being off by quite a bit!

Yep! Exactly.

I don't feel comfortable guestimating how many calories there are in a meal. I'm more of a numbers girl and would feel less anxiety if I knew an approximation!

figure out the calories for each item, add them up and divide by the number of servings and you will have your calorie count . If it is something you make often save the figures and you won't have to do it again.

Originally Posted by bargoo:
figure out the calories for each item, add them up and divide by the number of servings and you will have your calorie count . If it is something you make often save the figures and you won't have to do it again.

This, exactly.

Often when I make a big pot of something (which I do frequently), I have to count it out into portions as soon as it's ready so I can figure out how many portions it is.

For example, if I make a big pot of lentils with a bunch of ingredients, I will take a 1-cup scoop and count scoops from the pot into another container. Then I add up all the calories in the ingredients, and divide by the number of scoops in the finished product. Now I know how many calories are in a cup of the finished item.

Hope that helps!

Read the labels, tally up total calories in the finished dish. If it is produce or something without Nutrition Facts, there are calorie databases all over online.

Then like others said, just divide by whatever portion you actually ate. And don't forget to add in the butter or olive oil in the pan if you used them! I will sometimes forget.

I do the same as bargoo & carter. It's a pain initially, but if you write it down, you won't have to figure it out again.

You can also use a calorie counting website and create a recipe. Then you break it down into how many servings you want and then it calculates it for you.
With time though, you will get better about knowing how many calories are in what. It just takes a bit of time.

I find the most accurate calorie counting is by weight. If I had made that soup, I would have put my bowl on the scale, tared to 0, then added the broth, jotted down that number, tared to 0 and added a scoop of the solids, jotted down that number. Sounds complicated but is quick and easy. I keep a pad of notepaper by my scale so I can do this easily. A mini dry erase board works too.

For the solids, look at see if there is a majority of beans or pasta, or is it about half and half? If I weighed out 200g of solids, I would enter 100g of beans, 100g of pasta. Small bits of veggies are hardly worth counting, but if significant, divide the group up by the most calorie dense of the bunch.

So my tally may look like this:
300g broth
100g beans
75g pasta
25g tomatoes

2 things quickly come to mind:
A Digital Kitchen Scale & My Fitness Pal
Problem Solved!

thanks everyone.

I own a kitchen scale! I guess it's time to pull it out of the cupboard!!! :)