How Much Energy Do You Have,

In fact, “How do I track homemade meals, ” is one of the most common questions on nutritional forums, because everyone wants to know. So let’s discuss how to do it. To find out the nutritional value of food you cook or bake at home, you need to add up the nutritional values of every ingredient and divide by the number of servings the recipe yields.

We’ll get to how you determine “a serving” in a minute. I’m also the kind of person who likes to make her own calculators—you might remember my packing grid—so I’ve set up a spreadsheet to handle my recipe tracking. All you have to do is enter the values on the back of the packaging. If you’re getting your sunflower seeds from the bulk bin, say, and have no packaging with Nutrition Facts, you can look the nutritional values up online.

Google will often give you full nutritional info if you search a phrase like “sunflower seeds nutrition,” but when I made my chart I used info from Bob’s Red Mill because I specifically wanted raw sunflower seeds. I keep my phone handy for any calculations that I can’t do in my head, as well as any tablespoons-to-cups conversions that I may have forgotten.

In some cases—with meat, for example—your packaging will indicate nutritional value by weight instead of by measurement. Same general rules apply: figure out how much of the food item you’re adding to your meal, and calculate the nutritional data. If you want to be as accurate as possible, you can invest in a digital food scale and measure everything that way. Level cups, not heaping ones.

One tablespoon of olive oil, not “pouring until it feels right.” This is another reason why some people use a food scale: it helps them know exactly how much of each ingredient is going into their meals. Once you’ve got your ingredients measured and your total nutritional values calculated, you’ll need to divide those values by serving size. Soups and stews work well in one- or two-cup measurements—which means you’ll have to know how much soup you’ve made before you start serving it.

Pizzas, pies, and bread can all be divided into a specific number of slices. Muffins and granola bars are tracked per item. Yes, one of those muffins might be slightly larger than another one, but in this case being imperfectly accurate with your nutritional data is better than not knowing the data at all! Plus, the data is likely to average out. Once you have your serving size calculated, you can enter it into your MFP recipe calculator—or, if you’re following my spreadsheet model, enter the per-serving data into Fitbit or your favorite nutrition-tracking app.

I’ve been using Fitbit for three years, so that’s what I do—although Fitbit can integrate with MFP if you prefer to go that route! Most apps will give you the option to enter home-prepared foods, and then you can log them along with the other foods you eat throughout the day.

Once your app knows the nutritional values of a single cup of homemade soup, it’ll automatically calculate the correct values when you record that you ate two cups’ worth. Yes, this means that you do have to pay attention to how much food you eat, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to get out the measuring cups before every meal.

I know that my soup bowls hold two cups of liquid, for example. I also bought a set of two-cup freezer containers so I could freeze soup for later. Either way, you’re becoming more aware of what you’re eating, how much you’re eating, and how it’s affecting your long-term nutritional goals.

1. Take small tastes and assume that you’ll be eating 20-50 unaccounted calories now, but that they’ll get tracked later as you eat the meals—since you aren’t going to subtract those calories from your spreadsheet or recipe calculator. 2. Track your tastes. I made 24 granola bars, but divided my nutritional values by 25 to account for the granola bar dough I ate during the process.