How do I calorie count?

[Volluto]

I've always done SW in the past but after reading some of the other threads recently I thought I'd try calorie counting.

But how do I do it?
Obviously packaged food is easy as labelled. But tonight I want to make spaghetti with a tomato sauce and salad. How do I work out the calories of this?
Confused.

Download my fitness pal app, has calories for loads of food including fresh stuff, just need to search and put in thr portions.

Weigh out and calculate all the ingredients, then divide by the number of portions. It is more difficult to calculate if you are cooking family meals though, there is a certain amount of guess work.

Either weigh everything out and put them in or follow a recipe which states the calories and follow the recipe exactly.
bbcgoodfood has good recipes with calorie content.

You can add your own recipes to the myfitnesspal app. Add in all the ingredients/weights and how many portions it makes. App then calculates the rest for you and stores the info for the next time you have the same meal for dinner.

The fitbit app has the option of calorie logging.

So quite a laborious process if I have to enter all the ingredients from a recipe then.
Hmmm.
I have a Fitbit and can log calories there but I don't know how many calories are in the food I eat. Breakfast today was approx 1/3 cup oats, two tbsp natural yog and some cherries.
How do i log this. (Sorry to sound so thick)

It’s tedious at first, but once you’ve worked out the calories for all your regular favourite recipes it’s much quicker. You can google calorie counts for any ingredient or raw food that isn’t already listed on the packet. In practice, most items, especially in supermarkets, do have a calorie count marked on, even for raw veg.

I use LifeSum app. It is similar to My Fitness Pal. I did use MFP for a whole, but found it drained my phone battery really quickly.

On Life Sum you can scan barcodes to enter food eaten, but have found sometimes they are slightly inaccurate re calories per gram - what comes up on the app doesn't agree with the packaging. For example it might say that something contains 40 calories when it's actually 50. In which case I adjust the number of portions I enter into Life Sum, so it looks as though I've eaten 1.2 portions of something.

Life Sum also lists fresh foods, so I get into the habit of weighing everything.

I also know how many calories are in regularly-eaten food; I make my own bread in a breadmaker and I know that a particular loaf is 2.46 calories per gram. So when I cut a slice of bread it could vary between 40-60g per slice so I multiply however much the slice weighs by 2.46.

It takes longer when you first start, but you soon get used to what portion sizes of your regular foods look like, so less need to weigh.

For example 1/3 cup of oats, is that estimated? I got used to weighing out 40g of oats. Then after a while I didn't need to weight because I knew what 40g looked like.

Likewise, tablespoons of anything is massively inaccurate. If start off with weighing the 2tbsp yoghurt (By keeping bowl on scales after adding the oats). After a few goes you'll know how many grams your 2tbsp usually are.

Likewise your fruit. Keep your bowl on scales. Weight 40g if oats. Weigh 30g of yoghurt (or whatever your amounts are). Then add the usual amount of cherries you add (a handful?) and see how many grams this is.

After a while you'll be able to know, or at least estimate, what how many calories are in your breakfast as you make it. Then you can start thinking things like- if I had milk instead of yoghurt, how will that affect calories? What if I just added cinamon and no fruit? How about if I used a banana?

The idea of calorie counting is essentially self-education. So you learn how many calories things have in them. As with anything you learn, the more you do it the easier it becomes yo do.

I pay for the premium version of Life Sum (£40 per year, I think), but the premium option allows you to create 'meals' and 'recipes'. So a meal might be chicken, vegetables and rice and you enter the items/weights. Then next time you have that meal, you just choose 'chicken, veg & rice'. Obviously only works if you eat the same quantity of food each time!

And recipes allow you to create a recipe, and it asks how many people does it serve. So you could log ingredients for, say, bolognese sauce making six portions. Then next time you have bolognese just choose 'bolognese - one portion'.

It is laborious to log everything at first, but if you broadly eat the same things, it does become easier. I always eat the same breakfast of porridge and a cup of tea, so it takes me seconds to log it.

Weigh out and calculate all the ingredients, then divide by the number of portions. It is more difficult to calculate if you are cooking family meals though, there is a certain amount of guess work

And here we have the great advantage of Slimming World, where you just make spaghetti bolognese using lean mince and plenty of veg that would go in anyway (tomatoes, carrots, onions, celery, mushrooms). And just eat however much you need to be full, no issue with measuring out portions.

Calorie counting is incredibly tedious unless you eat a very repetitive and packaged diet, as the counting, measuring and data entry is just too much.

I use my fitness pal. You can scan barcodes to find the calorie count of the foods you are using. If you make a recipe in my fitness pal it saves it for next time. It's laborious to start with, but it remembers the things you've used so it's quicker and easier after a little while. You can also set it to sync with the fitbit app so it will port the calories across. I tried using the fitbit calorie counter but I prefer the my fitness pal one.

It is a pain to start with to weigh everything but it becomes a habit really quickly. I've been doing it for 6 months and don't even think about it any more. It works too. I've seen steady loss over the past few months and I'm pretty much at target now. Good luck.

I found that calorie counting is hard work if you cook from scratch and don't eat a lot of packaged foods like me. Also eating out or going to friends for dinner was hard to work out too. Myfitnesspal is a great app but it hammers home that it won't work unless you are accurate and weigh and measure absolutely everything.

What I found that works is just eating normally and massively reducing portion sizes. Your calories are cut right down without doing all the hard work.

It's a lot of work to start with - but gets much quicker, much easier and then the knowledge is with you for life.

Eg when doing my recipe counts, it makes it sooooo obvious that the veg, rice and sauce ingredients are all low calorie and it's any red meat / cheese that sends it through the roof.

You also find some bizarrely low calorie food eg ham and mushrooms

Most people eat the same things regularly, so weigh it all out once and then save it as a recipe so it's easy to add next time. For some things I just weigh the overall portion and then use a ready meal or restaurant equivalent that's in the database. It's not 100% accurate but I find it's near enough. So eg if I make vegetable lasagne rather than weighing each component I would weigh the portion served and find a database entry for vegetable lasagne and use that.

I like Nutracheck, although it does have a cost(free 7 day trial). Unlike my fitness pall it's UK based so the bar code scanner is much better and it's easy to find items from aldi, tesco etc on the database. Also has a section where you can put in your own recipes so the next time you make it you just select your portion size.

There is absolutely no need to calorie count if you are making food from scratch and making healthy meals. Just eat good food, lots and lots of veg, lean protein (meat and fish), good carbs (brown rice and pasta where possible, potatoes) quinoa, lentils etc.
Just eat a reasonable portion and stop when you are full. Drink lots of water. In fact drinking a glass of water before a meal helps you to eat a bit less.

Calorie counting and diets are so tedious and unnecessary if you are eating well.

And ironically, curly, that's SW in a nutshell .

curly I agree with you. My problem was, I didn't know what a reasonable portion was and also I snacked too much. Calorie counting and weighing portions has helped me learn how much is the right amount. It's made me more aware of what I'm eating too and whether I'm actually hungry or bored. Once I'm at my target I'm planning to live my life pretty much as in your post.