Counting Calories Using myfitnesspal.com

Updated on February 21, 2012
C.R. asks from Olathe, KS
5 answers

I have never tried to count calories before, or use any kind of websites to do so. I heard about this one from a friend and want to try it out. My question is this, how do you track calories from homemade meals?
Any info you can give is appreciated. Thanks!

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I.X.

answers from Los Angeles on

Don't know about your website, I have used calorieking.com. I don't like the on-line methods that also act as your food journal. I like to look things up on line but then enter it into my own food journal. The reason is that If you are even just a little unconventional in your eating, you will have a hard time looking things up. Also, I just find that once you've memorized calories in the foods you typically eat, you can do it faster by hand.
Now calorie values in home cooked food can be tricky. Here are my words of wisdom. Don't ever tell yourself you cannot know how many calories are in something. Take a moment, mentally dissect the ingredients, and figure out each component if need be. Error on the side of weight loss. What I mean is that if you are forced to guestimate how many calories, error on the high range. I found once I committed to erring high, I was actually quite capable of figuring out accurate calories. One more thought. I don't tell this to discourage you only to prepare you. If you have never counted calories before (or if its been a while), it is an all consuming task. The first two weeks are the hardest and the first month is still a steep learning curve. But if you keep it up, it gets to be second hat after about 4 weeks. Best of luck to you.

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A.M.

answers from Indianapolis on

My husband and I started using the myfitnesspal and we've not had any trouble with it. What I've done when I made meals is scan or input all the items in my recipe and then group all them together. If the severing size for the can of tomatoes is 1/2 cup but each serving of chili only has 1/4 cup then when you put in the tomatoes you just put you are eating a half serving. That always works well for me. After you put all the ingredients in under lunch, dinner, whatever, you can go back and save it as a meal so the next time you eat that item, you don't have to re-input everything. I love being able to scan my items in, I've only had a couple of items that weren't found and I manually had to type them in. Also some things are already in there. For example, I made roast, potatoes and carrots, I typed that into the search and it came up with the meal already in there and I would just choose the one that seemed closest to what I was having. Same things works when eating out.
ETA: I should add that we have this app on our smart phones so we use the camera to scan the barcodes.

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M.W.

answers from Chicago on

I use it and love it. There is a feature that allows you to creat a meal. Just enter what ingredients and how much you use and it should do the calcuation for you.

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C.O.

answers from Minneapolis on

I use this website: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

You can type in amounts for each ingredient and then how many it serves and it will give you the nutrition facts for that recipe. I use caloriecount.com to log in my calories. It's amazing how much you eat that you didn't realize you ate. I've lost over 20 lbs in the last 4 months.

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K.L.

answers from Des Moines on

I use it and I love it!

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