How to Track Calories and Macros in Home Food
If you’ve ever experimented with food tracking, you probably know that it is very easy to track calories and food macros in a can of chicken noodle soup or a box of chocolate chip cookies – the information is right on the package, and it’s often pre-loaded into apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal, but it’s much more difficult to track calories and macros in soup and cookies you make at home.
In fact: “How do I keep track of homemade meals?” is one of the most common questions on nutrition forums because everyone wants to know .
So let’s discuss how to do this.
Add ingredients
To determine the nutritional value of food you cook or bake at home, you need to add up the nutritional value of each ingredient and divide by the number of servings you get from the recipe. (We’ll learn how to define a “portion” in a minute.)
If you are using MyFitnessPal, they have a Food Recipe Calculator to guide you through the process. (The MFP app also has a recipe calculator.) I find the MFP recipe calculator more confusing than useful – you need to double-check all the brands and products offered by MFP to make sure you are entering the correct one. recipe and the MFP wants you to enter the ingredients by serving size, whereas I would prefer to put three cups in the recipe and define the servings at the end.
I’m also the type of person who loves making their own calculators – you may remember my packing grid – so I created a recipe tracking spreadsheet. Here’s a table I made for the muesli bars I made last weekend:
The table simplifies the process: enter the individual nutritional value for each ingredient, add up the values and divide by serving.
All you have to do is enter the values on the back of the package. If you are taking sunflower seeds from, say, a silo and do not have nutritional information packaging, you can look up nutritional information online. Google often gives you complete nutritional information if you enter a search phrase such as “sunflower seed nutrition,” but when I compiled my spreadsheet, I used information from Bob’s Red Mill because I wanted raw sunflower seeds.
In most cases, the value on the back of the package does not correspond to the exact measurement that you specify in the recipe; My bowl of oatmeal gives me the nutritional data for 1/2 cup of oatmeal, but I added three cups to the recipe. I keep my phone close at hand for any calculations I can’t do in my head, as well as any tablespoon-to-cup conversions I may have forgotten.
In some cases – for example with meat – your package will show the nutritional value by weight, not measured. The same general rules apply: Find out how many foods you add to your meal and calculate nutritional data.
If you want to be as accurate as possible, you can purchase a digital scale and measure everything that way.
It goes without saying, but once you start cooking, stick to the measurements in the table. Straighten the cups, not the fancy ones. One tablespoon of olive oil, do not pour until needed. This is another reason some people use a food scale to help them know exactly how much of each ingredient is in their meals.
Determine Your Serving Size
After you have measured the ingredients and calculated the total nutritional value, you need to divide those values by the serving size.
Your serving size usually depends on the type of food you are preparing. Soups and stews work well for measuring one or two cups – which means you need to know how much soup you’ve made before serving. (I fill my slow cooker to what I know is ten cups.) Pizza, tarts, and bread can be divided into a certain number of slices. Muffins and muesli bars are tracked for each item.
Yes, one of these cupcakes may be slightly larger than the other, but in this case, it is better not to know the nutritional data accurately enough than not knowing it at all! Also, the data is likely to be averaged. Using my granola bar recipe as an example, a slightly smaller bar might be closer to 160 calories, and a slightly larger bar might be closer to 180, but for a few days I’ll still be eating about 160 calories per bar.
Once you’ve calculated your serving size, you can enter it into your MFP recipe calculator or, if you’re following my spreadsheet model, enter your serving size into Fitbit or your favorite nutrition tracking app. (I have been using Fitbit for three years, which is why I do exactly that – although Fitbit can integrate with an MFP if you prefer to go that route!) Most apps will give you the ability to enter your home meals, and then you can record them along with other products. that you eat during the day.
Just because you’ve decided that “one cup” is a serving of soup doesn’t mean you’re forever stuck at one-cup dinners. Once your app knows the nutritional value of one cup of homemade soup, it will automatically calculate the correct values when you record that you ate two cups.
Yes, that means you should pay attention to how much food you eat, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to take out measuring cups before every meal. I know that, for example, my soup bowls can hold two cups of liquid. (I also bought a set of two-cup freezer containers to freeze the soup for later.)
You can calculate serving size per ounce, not per cup, and use a digital scale every time you eat, which will give you the most accurate nutritional information, or you can eat one granola bar, two cups of stew, or 1/6 of a pizza. … Either way, you have a better understanding of what you eat, how much you eat, and how this affects your long-term nutritional goals.
Tasting and other tips
A few more tips from those who have been doing this for a while:
If you like the taste while cooking, you can handle it in one of two ways:
- Take small flavors and assume that you are currently eating 20-50 unaccounted for calories, but they will be tracked later when you eat – since you are not going to subtract those calories from your spreadsheet or recipe calculator.
- Watch your tastes. I prepared 24 muesli bars but divided my nutritional value by 25 to account for the muesli bar dough I ate during the process.
If you tend to cook sloppily, you might be surprised how much harder you work to prevent spills or empty bowls once you start monitoring your diet. After all, clutter is literally leaving nutrients on the table.
If you’re concerned about perfect accuracy, you can get pretty close to digital scales, but keep in mind that food manufacturers are also not required to provide accurate nutritional information. They are only required to be within a certain range of accuracy, which is what you aim for in your own tracking.
Your fitness tracker is also not a perfect calorie burn meter. All this nutritional tracking actually has to do with getting as close to actual data as possible and then watching trends: how are you feeling? How much energy do you have? What is your digestion? Is your weight being maintained or changing as you expect?
From there, you can tweak the various aspects as needed – just like you add a teaspoon of salt to chicken noodle soup and then add that teaspoon’s value to a spreadsheet.