SOMEBODY TEACH ME!

[mandhmummy23]

So I'm mega mega confused.
I want to start calorie counting as I'm determined to lose weight but want to educate myself properly before I start.
Any advice welcome
Specifically on how the fuck do i calorie count when making a family meal, say chicken tikka in the slow cooker.
How am I meant to know the exact amount of chicken I'm eating or the exact amount of sauce I have? 😂
Sorry if this is really stupid but I haven't got the slightest clue on what I'm doing.

I think you'd have to add up each component part eg the chicken and then estimate your portion of it eg 1/4

For tikka how are you making it - from a jar r fresh ingredients?

Have you tried the my fitness pal app? Some items are preloaded or you can scan a barcode I believe

You can go about it a few ways. Besides the methods mentioned above, you can also use the recipe function on mfp in which case you would add each ingredient in the full amount and specify how many servings. So if you are cooking for 4 you'd say 4 and mfp would divide the total calories to give you the amount for your serving. Then save the recipe to use again another day. It sounds a bit of a faff but once you get used to it, it's little more effort than following any recipe from a cookbook which you'd probably weigh anyway. Obviously any serving from a slow cooker is likely to be a guesstimate but I haven't found that an issue in terms of losing weight.

Another alternative is to cook from recipes that already have a calorie count, say on bbcgoodfood for example. MFP has a recipe section too but I've never tried any. You can 'quick add' the calories if you are not bothered about watching macros as well.

If you occasionally have the same meal 2 days running such as a homemade curry, or have the same breakfast most days you can also log yesterday's meal so you don't have to re-enter everything again. There is also a copy meal to another date function but I'm not sure that's on every platform.