How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food
In this article, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know on how to calculate calories of homemade food.
Because if I’m being honest, this is the hardest part of counting calories in general.
It’s fine and dandy when you heat up a microwaveable meal, grab some fast food, eat a small snack and the online nutrition calculators and nutrition labels have all the numbers laid out for you so that you can just plug and chug.
But what happens when you have to make a massive homemade meal for friends and family with multiple ingredients?
It’s not as easy or straightforward.
But luckily, I’m here to help.
I’m going to make sure that after you’re done reading, you will know exactly what to do to calculate calories of homemade food.
So without further ado, let’s dive in.
How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food
Are You Doing It Wrong?
Firstly, I understand why you’re here. You’re looking to make a change whether it’s to lose fat, build muscle, improve your health, or whatever it is.
You want to do so by taking the structured approach of calculating your calories.
However, here’s a simple truth.
Most people (maybe including you) are doing it wrong one way or another, whether they are aware of it or not.
And look, I’m not saying this to be a dick.
I’m saying this in hopes of helping you realize the truth behind why you’re not losing weight even though you swear you’re in a calorie deficit.”
Because there is a huge difference between thinking you’re in a calorie deficit and actually being in a calorie deficit.
And the culprit?
By and large, the number one reason people are sabotaging their calorie deficit is that they aren’t weighing their food out in grams on a food scale.
If you aren’t weighing your food, you’re basically just pouring food into a bowl and saying “that’s about a serving.”
Using measuring spoons and cups for solid foods is also not a reliable method.
And when you use these unreliable methods to count calories you end up actually eating way more calories than you thought.
The end result?
Your calories tracked and actual calories being eaten don’t line up and therefore you’re not actually in a calorie deficit which means you’re not going to lose any weight.
By the way, in a recent podcast, I talk about 5 Common Calorie Tracking Mistakes which you can listen to HERE.
I have also written a whole other article on how to track calories which you can read about HERE if you want to learn more about tracking calories or just need a quick refresher.
Secondly, even if you are tracking correctly, your calorie target may just not be realistic for you.
If you need help finding the number of calories you need, check out my completely free calorie calculator HERE (here’s a hint: it’s not 1200 calories according to MyFitnessPal or what your favorite influencer guru doctor says).
So just like anything else in life, if you aren’t seeing the progress or results you’re after, yes make sure you’re taking all the appropriate steps, but also make sure you’re doing all those steps correctly!
How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food: Ideal And Not-So-Ideal Scenarios
Now, I understand that tracking calories is tough, especially with homemade food, but I’m going to further break this down into two possible scenarios you may face in your calorie tracking career.
This is so that you leave no stone unturned and will always be prepared no matter what life decides to throw at you.
Note that I will mainly be referring to MyFitnessPal which is a completely free calorie tracking app available to all smartphone users.
It looks something like this:
And while yes, I’m aware that there are at least hundreds of calorie-tracking apps out there nowadays, MyFitnessPal is the one that I have the most experience using to track calories and change my body composition while also helping many of my online coaching clients do the same.
Now let’s discuss these two possible scenarios.
How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food: Ideal Scenario
The ideal scenario for how to calculate calories of homemade food is when you have 100% control over every single ingredient going into the dish.
If this doesn’t apply to you, we’ll get to that in a second, but this is going to be the most accurate way to know exactly what and how many calories are going into your body.
Weigh Out Each Ingredient Separately
The first step is going to be gathering all of your ingredients and then logging each ingredient separately.
For example, let’s say you are meal-prepping chicken, rice, and broccoli for the week.
After you get all your ingredients, you are going to weigh all of them (in grams) and take note of the amounts.
In this example, you have:
- 300g of raw chicken breast
- 200g of dry, uncooked long-grain white rice
- 100g of raw broccoli
- 2 tbsp (45g) of olive oil for cooking
Look, I know the grams can be confusing (I get it, I’m also American lol), but I highly encourage you to use grams as it will be the most accurate way to measure solid foods.
Once you have everything weighed out, you now know the calorie breakdown of the total food you have.
But since you’re not going to be eating 10 lbs of food (or maybe you are, no judgment), we need to figure out your serving sizes.
Figuring Out Serving Sizes
If we were to talk about the “serving sizes” listed on most nutrition labels, it’s full of shit (who actually thinks 2/3 cup of ice cream is one serving??).
Most of them just list an arbitrary serving size to mislead you into thinking their product is low-calorie.
Nonetheless, for our purposes, serving sizes are still important for managing portion control.
An easy example would be let’s say you make an entire sheet of 12 muffins.
You would then have 12 muffins to distribute over however long you want and your serving size would be 1 muffin.
A harder example would be for something like soups, stir frys, casseroles, or any other dish that may be served “family style” and not in individual portions.
But fear not as it’s not as difficult to figure this out as you may think.
Let’s say you cooked an entire meal for your family of 4.
And if you know that everyone is going to have about the same amount of food. That means you’ll break the recipe up into 4 servings.
(But if you were to cook a meal just for yourself, that would only be 1 serving since you’re planning to finish it.)
What if you can’t finish it? You can still make it 1 serving but break it up into 1/3 or 1/2 servings depending on how much of it you ate and save the other portion for later.
If you’re thoroughly confused, it’s okay, we’ll touch more on this later.
Enter Everything Into MyFitnessPal
Now that you have everything measured out, open up your MyFitnessPal app.
Then go to
“Diary”
“Add Food”
Select “My Recipes”
“Create a Recipe”
Go ahead and name your meal whatever you want. In this case, let’s just say “Chicken, Broccoli, and Rice Meal Prep”.
Enter the number of servings you’re planning to split this over.
Now start adding your ingredients in.
Search for the food you’re using and input each of them ensuring that you have the correct serving sizes in there as well.
Remember that it’s super important you followed the steps above to ensure accurate calculations of your meals.
Note: You may need to change the serving sizes in MyFitnessPal from cups or oz to grams, which you can easily do by clicking on “Serving Size.”
Once you did all that, it should look something like this.
Once you get to the final screen, go ahead and save it.
Now that you have all the details for the entire recipe, we need to figure out what your personal serving size looks like.
Figuring Out Your Personal Serving Size
Unless you’re eating the entire pan (which at this point, you can ignore this section), you’ll need to figure out your personal size so that your calories logged match up with how much you’re actually eating.
Head back onto MyFitnessPal and hit:
“Diary”
“Add Food”
“My Recipes”
Click on your recipe.
Now it will ask you how many servings you are eating.
With things that are already portioned out like muffins, pie, pizza, etc. it can be easy to portion it out. One serving is 1 muffin or slice.
But let’s say you made this chicken, broccoli, and rice meal for you, your spouse, and your two kids.
Your kids probably won’t be eating as much as you (or maybe they will if they were like me growing up!).
In this case, we’ll say your kids ate about 1/2 serving each. And then you and your spouse have about 1.5 servings each. This would amount to:
1/2 serving for kid #1 + 1/2 serving for kid #2 = 1 total serving.
1.5 serving for you + 1.5 serving for your spouse = 3 total servings.
1 total serving + 3 total servings = 4 total servings, which is the same amount you had in the recipe calculator.
Assuming everything was finished and all of your dishes were licked clean, you’re good to go.
Otherwise, let’s say there were some leftovers. If you ate a bit less, adjust it to maybe 1 serving or 1.25 servings instead of 1.5, do your best.
But if you are cooking for just yourself for that moment in time, just log your recipe as is as one serving.
If are, say, meal prepping for the week, and you’re going to eat the rest later through the week, here’s what to do.
Let’s say you’ve cooked up and logged a meal into MyFitnessPal.
It turned out to be a lot bigger than you anticipated (that’s what she said) so now you’re planning to eat half of it tonight and the other half for lunch tomorrow.
You would still use the same recipe but make sure to split it up into 1/2 serving at dinner and then 1/2 serving at lunch.
Same thing if you decide to split that into 3 meals. Enter it as 1/3 serving for each meal.
This way, you are logging all of the calories for that dish, but are splitting it up and logging it accordingly.
This is how you do it in a perfect world.
However, more often than not, life doesn’t go as planned.
What do you do if your scenario is not-so-ideal?
How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food: Not-So-Ideal Scenario
Alright, so we talked about the ideal scenario where you are fully in control and know exactly everything in their exact amounts going into your recipe.
But what if these scenarios come up?
Maybe you aren’t the one cooking it, it contains exotic ingredients not found on calorie-tracking apps, or maybe because life just happens and throws us a curveball.
Well, firstly, here’s the number one thing you need to know…
It’s About Being Consistent, Not Perfect
And look, I know at the beginning of the article, I was knocking on people who don’t track accurately, but the other part of it is realizing there are going to be times where you aren’t quite 100% accurate. And that is completely okay.
You want to know why?
Because in order to see progress, you don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be consistent.
It’s about being on point most of the time.
And this is how most of my online coaching clients start with tracking calories and eventually don’t need to do it anymore!
It’s because through the repetition of weighing and measuring what 100g of chicken breast, broccoli, rice, and other food staples in their diet, they eventually ingrained into their head what the serving size approximately looks like.
And when you practice and measure enough foods enough times, you’ll start to have a mental idea of the calories and macro breakdown of the meals you’re having and realize that you’ll be able to still make progress while not being perfectly accurate.
This then translates to you being able to make better decisions even when you get into situations where you aren’t able to track homemade foods due to the circumstances.
In these situations, I say do the best you can with what you’ve got, and live and learn.
Even if you ate too much in one day, it’s not the end of the world.
Just get right back to track when things are in your control again.
But if you really want to log something down, my best piece of advice would be to do your best to break the dish down and track what you know is in the dish and then overestimate how many calories are in it.
That way, if it was higher than you thought, then you nailed it. If it was lower, then you were under your targets.
What About Meats? Should You Weigh Them Raw or Cooked?
And then inevitably, this extremely common question regarding tracking calories comes up.
I would say when in doubt, always go with what the packaging says.
If you’re eating, say, pre-cooked rotisserie chicken breast, the package likely lists the correct calories and macros for it.
But if you’re going to be preparing raw chicken breast straight from the supermarket, the package will likely list the calories and macros for it in its raw state so be sure to measure it before cooking.
For the most part, I recommend weighing meats when it is raw because this is going to be the most accurate.
Why? Because meats typically lose water weight as it cooks and this can be skewed depending on the cooking method itself too.
Grilling or pan-frying chicken? Some of the water gets evaporated.
Throwing meat into a soup or crockpot with broth? Some of the water is going to be retained.
So this can potentially throw some of the numbers off.
So that’s why. 🙂
Either way, make sure that when you are logging it in MyFitnessPal, specify “cooked chicken breast” or “raw chicken breast” when you’re searching for the item.
Counting Calories By Not Counting Calories
No, this isn’t some ancient Chinese proverb.
But if worse comes to worst and you can’t count anything, that’s fine too.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to count calories to see progress, but calories always count.
What does this mean?
This basically means that you don’t have to physically count calories through logging to keep track of your calorie intake.
There are many other ways to control your calorie intake by managing your portion sizes and food choices.
This means that by swapping out certain foods in your diet and by using portion control methods, you can create more satiating and lower-calorie meals without having to count a single calorie.
Some ways I like to approach this are using the 3 Plates/2 Snacks Method and always including a large serving of protein of at least 30g in any meal you’re eating (both of these are discussed in my other article HERE).
Final Thoughts On How To Calculate Calories Of Homemade Food
Aaaaand that’s it!
That covers everything you need to know about how to calculate calories of homemade food.
Yes, I know this was a lot and it will require some hard work, but nothing is impossible.
You won’t get things right the first several times. You will mess up.
But it’s not about getting everything right the first time, it’s about actually starting and doing the thing and being 1% better every day.
So go out and do the thing. You got this.
And if you ever need help with anything at all or have any questions come up, please shoot me an email.
Otherwise, until next time,
-Aus
