How accurate is MFP?

[ratsel]

I’m tracking my food on MFP but never having done anything like this before I’m finding it a bit difficult.

For example I’m making a vegetarian shepherds pie for dinner so have added all the ingredients then scaled down to get my portion. It’s coming out as my portion being nearly 700 calories! How can this be? It’s literally vegetables, herbs and stock! I know lots of vegetables are carby but didn’t think they were calorific. Portion size not massive either (we have 1970’s plates with a patterned rim and my dinner always fits on the white part with room to spare)

Are some foods logged on there incorrectly? I have never even looked at calories before so have no clue

What are your ingredients and weights and how many people is it serving?

MFP is notoriously inaccurate, as users can input their own nutritional information and they're frequently incorrect. It's best to either scan the barcode of the item, or specify the brand, while making sure you use the UK results (or whichever country you live in).

Are you starting with cooking the onions in oil? Does it use Quorn type meat substitutes?

I can’t remember the weights now as I gave up trying to log it accurately but it was basically

A large onion
8 average sized carrots
A clove of garlic
4 large flat mushrooms
3 celery stalks
A large leek
A vegetable stock cube plus water
2 tbsp tomato purée
1 tbsp flour
150g frozen peas
8 medium sized potatoes
25 ml milk

Less than a teaspoon of vegetable oil (my bottle has a stopper that measures out 5ml worth and I stopped it before it stopped itself iyswim)

Served with sprouts and broccoli on the side.

8 equal sized portions

Oh and some dried thyme and rosemary

There's a Recipes function on MFP. You input the ingredients for the whole recipe, input how many in serves and it will work out the calories per portion for you. Unless that's what you've already done.

I'll be surprised if each portion is more than 250kcals if you're getting 8 servings out of that!! Something has obviously gone wrong somewhere as none of those things I have any problems finding fairly accurately. Not more than double the amount out anyway.

That's one potato per pertion and they can be quite calorific, add the oil and I could believe it could be 600/700 calories yes.