Question about My Fitness pal

[extinctspecies]

I am thinking about getting this as I have put on half a stone in the last year (was already slightly overweight) which I would like to shift.

I already cook mainly from scratch, and was wondering how that works with the app - how would I count the calories, in, say, a veg stew I made today? Would I need to weigh out each ingredient and account for it separately ...

[BrownTurkey]

What I do is search ‘vegetable stew homemade’ and someone will have estimated or worked out the calories per portion, just select one that seems about right. But it depends how accurate you want it.

[extinctspecies]

Ah, Ok, didn't know you could do that. Thanks Turkey.

[iklboo]

There's s recipe tab where you can enter your own ingredients, weigh them out etc and it will work out the calories etc per portion. Then you can save it for next time.

[Threehoursfromhome]

If you use recipes which are available online, you can paste in the url and the ingredients/ nutritional values will be imported into mfp, although they sometimes need a bit of tweaking - it won't necessary recognise 'chopped onions' for example, you might have to edit to 'onions.'

[extinctspecies]

Ok. Sounds like quite a lot of effort though.

What about bread? I don't buy standard supermarket sliced bread - I slice my own from a local bakery. I guess I have to weigh it ...

[iamyourequal]

Hi OP. Its quite easy to enter your own recipes and save them on MFP. This is definitely worth doing for recipes you make regularly. You can edit them and change portion sizes etc too. I'd be much happier doing that than guessing some one else's recipes were similar to mine calorie wise. I think you should definitely weigh your bread. Well done managing to keep good bakery bread in your kitchen whilst dieting. My willpower couldn't cope with that !

[Yazoop]

It is a bit of a faff at the beginning. But after a couple of weeks, you'll have logged most of your usual recipes and ingredients and it will become very easy to log them through the day. And it works! Good luck x