My fitness pal query

[amateurcynic]

Hello, very new to MN, please be kind!

I signed up to MFP yesterday after reading about it on threads here. I am 16lbs overweight currently. Not planning to do any specific diet - just exercise more and be more aware of what I'm stuffing in my face!

My question is with regards to adding food. If you cook most of your meals from scratch, and generally don't follow recipes with calorie counts listed, how on earth do you work out how many calories to enter?

Is it just a matter of guesswork? I love cooking as does my DP so I'd much rather just eat smaller portions of what we cook already.

Any tips appreciated!

[stella69x]

Try caloriecount.com their site has a recipe analyser that you input your ingredients and amount of portions the recipe makes and it calculates the calories and nutrition data for you.

[iwouldgoouttonight]

You can save recipes in My Fitness Pal. How I do it is cook the meal how I normally would but weigh each thing before cooking it and enter it all as a recipe in MFP. Its a bit of a faff the first time you do each meal but then the next time you cook it its already there. I cook mainly from scratch and don't make a recipe exactly the same each time but it does give you a good idea of calories and what size portion you should stick to.

[amateurcynic]

Thank you so much for your responses! Will try calorie count and explore better on MFP too.