Question about calories
 

Ok I am finally calorie counting instead of doing fad diets but I have a question that may be silly, but here goes.....How do you figure out total calories fat all that jazz in something I have made. For instance Tuna salad.....how do I know how many servings are in it and how many calories for the whole dish and just one serving. I am so confused it is sad. thanks for helping....

What I do is write down the nutrition value of each item that goes into what I am making. Total it up and divide it by the number of servings. If I am making something for the first time and the recipe doesn't show me serving size, then I actually measure or weigh out what I think are servings sizes (usually 1 cup). This means that I take out another bowl and scoop one cup servings of what I've made and put it into the other bowl. I know it's a pain at first, but then I know how many servings and what size for that recipe -- so I write it down on the recipe.

For me, that's the only way. Your example of tuna salad could have many more ingredients than my tuna salad so using a generic number could have the nutrition info WAY off.

Kimberly

I use a program called Mastercook and enter my recipes into it. I love it because I can also use it to tweak recipes. If the original contains too many calories, I'll subtract a litte of this, replace that, etc until it looks better.

Oh yeah... I use that too! Mastercook 9.

Kimberly

I've heard that the custom version of Fitday has a really nice feature to make it easy to calculate calories in a recipe. I just always used an Excel spreadsheet, I made the columns the same as Fitday nutrition quantities and just added rows for every ingredient. I would just sum the totals for each column and enter the recipe as a custom food in Fitday. Serving size isn't so tough, if you make enough to eat 4 helpings, that's 4 servings. Enter the whole number into Fitday and then enter .25 for the serving size for the day (fitday will calculate the serving calories).

Huge pain in the butt, but only had to do it one time per recipe. I tend to eat the same things over and over, so it was really only moderately annoying.

I tend to look dishes up on the internet for a calorie count and I guess on the portoin size (though if I'm home I'll pour say the cereal into the measuring cup to get it exact). This is especially helpful with fast food dining (which I rarely do) as you can look up the menu BEFORE you go and make some planning decisions before you go out and fast food is the only thing around to eat. To me, the whole point of calorie counting is to get a reality check on what I'm really eating. So looking up the calories is sometimes surprising but works to get me in gear. For example, back before I gained this weight I rarely ate any meat other than chicken. But this past year I got into steak and pork as well. Recently when I started counting calories in fitday, I was surprised to see how many more calories are in meats (of course everyone knows this but I was thinking its healthy/diety cuz its low in carbs and its natural). I also like to eat prepared meals like frozen South Beach Diet entrees as this gives you an accurate calorie total for your meal. Best of luck figuring it all out.

Like Glory, I have a spreadsheet I created to do this. Most of my recipes are glued to index cards, so I print out the spreadsheet and glue it to the back of the card. But there are free online tools that can do this analysis for you--try www.fitwatch.com (the free version not the deluxe) or www.nutritiondata.com.

As to figuring out servings when they aren't specified, sometimes I work backwards based on how many calories I want each serving to be. Tuna salad is a great example of this. Let's say the entire batch of tuna salad has 900 calories and I want each individual serving to have around 300 calories. I would divide it into three servings. If I want each serving to have only around 200 calories, I would divide it into 4 servings.

If I have a recipe that says how many servings it makes, I usually go with that. There are a couple of exceptions to this, however. If the servings seem too small to me or the calories in each serving are really low (usually a sign that the serving size is too small), I'll redivide the aggregate calories by the number of servings I actually think it will be. If the calories per serving are a little high, sometimes I'll add more veggies and then increase the number of servings to get to a calories per serving I'm happy with.