working out calorie value in home-cooking

This topic contains 5 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by Princess Cilantro 8 years ago.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Jennifer59

2:38 am
20 Mar 15
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I love cooking and hate arithmetic. Any tips on how to work out the calorie value of home cooking? For example today I made soup. I had chicken broth from when I poached chicken breasts – with onion, slices of lemons and herbs, no fat or oil added. I chopped a large onion and cooked it gently in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Then added the broth, 2 grated carrots, 1 grated potato, a lump of pumpkin, grated and about 1/3 of a cup of red lentios. Cooked for about 15 minutes and seasoned with chopped parsley and black pepper. It madeabout 1.5 litres of soup I guess and it is totally delicious but how many calories in a cupful?
If this has been explained in another topic or another part of this site please just tell me where to look. Thanks people.

irisblue

2:50 am
20 Mar 15
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Ok, what you need to do is get a good calorie counting book. I don’t know if you’re in the U.S. or Europe, because measurements for figuring calories are different, but here in the U.S. I use a great little book called Calorie King. It has listings of everything. It also has a great website, where you can look up the calories on-line.

If you’re very new to calorie counting, what you need to do is write down each ingredient you’re using and how much, look up each one for the calories, add it up, divide by how many servings you’re having.

If you’re in Europe, there must be something similar to Calorie King there.

I know it sounds like a lot of work but believe me, I’ve counted calories daily for YEARS, and just counting calories for two days a week is a total God-send! I’ll never go back to the tedious daily counting. It was never sustainable.

Good luck!

irisblue

2:53 am
20 Mar 15
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p.s. Also, I highly recommend Dr. Mosley’s revised Fast Diet book. I don’t have it with me right now, but I’m pretty sure there’s a calorie counter for some basic foods in the back of the book, etc. I highly recommend the book!

suzy61

2:58 am
20 Mar 15
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Hi Jennifer59,

I use an app called My Fitness Pal, which gives you the exact calorie content of each food you are cooking with – when you first start out it is a little time consuming, but you get used to it really quickly 🙂 You can also enter your food intake for each day and it calculates what you have used or have left. I just luv it, can’t really fudge the the figures. Good luck !!
p.s. you will need to invest in a set of small digital kitchen scales which measures in one gram increments – not expensive – I got mine from my local kitchenware shop 🙂

Jennifer59

4:40 am
20 Mar 15
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thanks Suzy and Iris. I guess I’ll just have to grit my teeth and do the arithmetic!It will be worth working out some of the foods I cook most often anyway. It has been easy over the summer when I eat mainly salad on fast days but with winter coming soups are going to be more inviting. (I live in the Southern Hemisphere.)

Princess Cilantro

1:17 am
1 Apr 16
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I use sparkpeople.com
In the spark recipe section is a recipe calculator.