I use my fitness pal, and overall I like it because it has a lot of different brands to choose from. But how do you guys figure out calories for food you make at home? Do you do it by ingredient, or just guesstimate?
Thanks!!

I do my best to add up the calories of each ingredient than divide the total by the number of servings...

I do the same thing. I add up the calories of ingredients as I put them in and then divide by how many portions I split the finished product into.


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Oh, you will all love this link:

http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

Just enter in the quantities (it's a little futzy sometimes), tell it the number of servings and voila! Double check that it didn't do anything silly (or you did), but I've found it very helpful!

Heather, thanks so much for that link!! That will be very helpful!

I use my weight watcher's scale, even though I don't follow WWs. It is really helpful!

when i use those online ones, the calories are FAR off from what the labels on my ingredients actually say it's so frustrating.....even tonight i tried to calculate the calories in my homemade lasagna...i lost the packaging to the sausage that i used and went online and even THEN the calorie counts that i found varied by over 500 calories!!

so i basically took a huge stab in the dark and tried to calculate from my best guess.....and i still have no idea how accurate that is

what i do with homemade things, is to keep a good track of my calories during the day as well as my workout...and then eat my dinner without going overboard...and dont eat anything else tonight

today i had eaten 560 calories before dinnertime, with 360 calories burned during my workout this morning....for dinner i had 3 small pieces of garlic bread and 2 regular sized pieces of homemade lasagna...i calculated that anywhere from 850 calories total to 1210 total...LOL i'm so lost...im just gonna call it good for the night and not eat anything else ...ackkk!

I use the recipe calculator at spark people. http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

Alaskanlaughter's frustrations regarding online calorie counts are eliminated as you can search for ingredients other people have entered or just enter them yourself. It's a bit fiddly to enter the recipes and figure out how many servings each dish has but well worth it in my opinion. I usually weigh the entire dish and then keep that in mind when I'm figuring out how many servings I can get out of it.

eta - I use fitday (not the fitday2 option! I find the original far easier to use) to log my calories. I just take the results from the recipe calculator and enter them as custom food. I would imagine you can do something similar at myfitnesspal?

Digital food scales and a wide array of measuring cups and measuring spoons are my friends. If it's something that becomes difficult to calculate, I sometimes make my portions separately from my husband's portion, so I know exactly what went into my portions. I sometimes do this with stuff like pasta and rice where the packaging always gives the calories for the dry amount, and I'm never comfortable with how this translates to the cooked amount. Also with ground beef and stuff like that because the calories for 4 oz raw and 4 oz cooked are quite a bit different, and I prefer to go with the raw calculation.

This is the main reason I use Loseit over Myfitnesspal. Loseit lets you create and save recipes where you add in each ingredient and then divide out the calories by serving. What I love most about it is that you can do it once, and if you make the same recipe again it's already there to be selected from. If the recipe got tweaked in the re-make, it's easy enough to go and tweak the entry to match.

A kitchen scale is indispensable!

I also count the ingredients and measure with a digital scale, measuring spoons, etc. If I use any pre-made stuff that has nutrition facts on it, I look up the online nutrition facts too and go with the one that's HIGHER.

Sounds like a lot of work, but I make the same things over and over again.

Yup. Loseit for me too. Love the recipe feature! Have all our usuals right there!