Figuring Calories For Homemade Food

[Χά�ων]

I am trying to keep track of calories but I am finding it difficult since I do not use prepackaged foods. For example today for lunch I made 'green mean soup' it contained the following:

 

Artichoke hearts

Asparagus

Peas

Broccoli

Spinach

Cabbage

Onion

 

For seasoning I used:

garlic powder

Curry powder

Salt

Pepper

Chicken grill season mix (homemade mix)

Italian seasoning (homemade mix)

 

I browned the onion and cooked the cabbage with a bit of olive oil.

 

I pureed everything so I cannot just count each individual piece. I just have no clue how to figure up calories.

[StephanieZ]

Enter it all into a recipe on food.com. Then it will figure it up for you. :) That's what I did. For like a day. Then I decided that calorie tracking wasn't feasible for a from-scratch-change-it-up-daily family. Most dishes require 10-30 ingredients, and I rarely make the same thing more than once or twice a month.

 

FWIW, you can disregard the calories from the seasonings. (Not the oil, though, count that.)

[Ali in OR]

It takes time, but if you use something like My Fitness Pal, you can enter in all of the ingredients and the number of servings and it will calculate all of the nutritional information for you. I have done it for things we eat a lot, such as our Saturday morning pancakes. MFP is free, so even if you don't want to track your daily calories on there, you could use it just to calculate your recipes. Their database of foods is very good--usually any ingredient I use (even the specific brand) is already in there and accurate.

 

The other approach is just to calculate the heavy duty ingredients. If you're worried about calories, I would think that would be the oil, maybe artichoke hearts. I think things like peas, cabbage, and onion are going to be so minimal that it might not be worth the work of entering them. If you're worried about something like sodium levels, it would be important to enter all of the spices, but they won't do much calorie-wise.

[Rachel]

In the old days I used a calorie book, wrote down the total calories of the ingredients and divided by the number of servings. Now I create recipes in the Lose it app.

[Truscifi]

I also use MyFitnessPal to calculate calories. It prompts you through everything and is very easy. Time consuming though.

[justasque]

Weight Watchers has made it fairly easy, by considering most fruits and vegetables zero WW points.

In your scenario, the oil, and perhaps some of the seasonings depending on what's in them and how much you used, would have points, but the veggies would not.

The long-term key, I think, is to do the math enough times that you can begin to estimate the calories of similar dishes.  As an example, 1 cup rice/pasta with veg (most non-starchy kinds) and an ounce of hard cheese will come out to about the same amount, regardless of type of veg or cheese or rice/pasta.