To complicate matters further, consider that the calorie counts for raw meat vs cooked can differ significantly.

For example, 1 oz of raw chicken breast without bone/skin is 31 cals and 1 oz of the same roasted is 46 cals (taken from nutritionaldata.com).

This drives me CRAZY because, most of the time, it's true not only of meats but also just about everything else as well.

Which I choose depends on the recipe...if I'm simply sauteeing boneless/skinless chicken breast and will not be eating any of the drippings/juices/liquid that remain after cooking, I use cooked, but if I'm making a stew or something that I WOULD eat the liquid remaining, then I choose raw.

Not exactly on topic, but, like I said, it drives me nuts!

S

I usually just estimate on the high side of what I think it will be, if ballparking the calories for each incredient and dividing by the number of ounces or cups in the recipe.


Like - I made homemade pizza tonight, with even the dough from scratch. So I did a recipe for the dough by ingredient to get the total calorie count. Then I split the dough into two balls (one for now, one for the freezer), then decided I'd be cutting the pizza into eighths. So that makes 16 servings of dough from one recipe. So I calculated that I'd like to eat three slices (around 364 calories of dough) with seven pepperonis (about 80 calories), one tablespoon of sauce
(15 calories) and 1/3 of a cup of cheese (110 calories). Entered
it in to be tracked and went on with my day.

I could have also calculated the dough calories (about 800 per pizza), three tablespoons of sauce, 1 cup of cheese and 15 pepperonis, then divided those total calorie amounts by 8 to get the approximate amount per slice.


Being a 'handful of this, dash of that' cook made calorie counting hard, so I have had to make sure I get in the habit of measuring ingredients and then noting any additional amounts I tweak for flavoring. As long as I am within 20-ish calories of the actual serving amount I don't sweat it, or I estimate a slightly bigger portion than I actually ate just to make sure I am not taking in additional calories.

Hope that helps!

Could tote up all ingredients for the whole pot then divide by the ounce or by 8 or 12 or whatever ounces are in a portion...