How do you work the calories in your home cooked meals?

[ifoughtforliberty]

Am making a veggie stew (six portions) for tea tonight. Ingredients: 1 onion, 2 sticks celery, 3 tbsp flour, 1 tbsp marmite, 1 tbsp tomato purée, 2l vegetable stock, 3 carrots, 4 parsnips, 1/2 swede, 3 sweet potatoes, 150g orzo pasta.

I don't know how to work out the calories. Would you weigh everything out?

My fitness pal app you can put in individual items like that and it will spew out the calories x

I was also coming on to say my fitness pal!!

I use a lot of BBC Good Food recipes as they handily give the calories per portion. Otherwise I put 'turnip' into MFP and it usually gives you options like small, medium or large.

Fitbit does the same job working out the calories. I work out the entire dish and then divide by the number of portions and just don’t worry about whether the division is exact. If you’re trying to lose weight and counting calories long term then being 30 cals over or under one day because you had a spoonful more or less of the stew isn’t going to make or break...

Ok thank you will have a look at that.

Yes, if you want it to be accurate you need to weigh it.

If you’re not bothered about it being accurate down to the last calorie, you can put in general values like that.