Weight-Loss How to calculate calories in home-made food?

[cheesemisfit]

I whipped up a pretty amazing turkey Bolognese sauce today... but I have NO clue how to determine how many calories went into it!?

How exactly do I go about counting the calories that goes into home cooked food? Do I add all the cals of the raw ingredients together and if I eat half, divide by 2?! Or do the calories change whilst cooking?

If anyone has any help or advice with this, that would be muchos appreciated! I'm all ears! x

 

[MattV1984]

That is essentially the way I do it. I make a "nutrition table" in which I total up all the calories, fat, carbs, vitamins, etc. I figure out how much of the food was made and decide on a serving size, then divide the total by the number of servings to get my per serving amounts. So if I make a rice dish that produces 12 cups with a total of 1000 calories (these numbers just happen to be the first thing that came to mind, they do not reflect on any real dish) and I want my serving to be one cup I would divide 1000 by 12 and determine that each serving has 83 calories.

Unfortunately I cannot say with 100% certainty that the nutrients of a food will change in terms of quantity from simply adding heat, but I do know that the structure of some nutrients such as proteins change with heat (as observed when a raw egg white goes from clear to white during cooking). While looking at the nutritiondata.self.com nutrient fact website the only thing that changes from 1 ounce of raw egg to 1 ounce of cooked poached egg is that the sodium content increases, though I speculate this may have happened if the egg was cooked with salt.

 

[Toddless]

It's homemade! Don't worry about the calories, just enjoy the real food (without overeating, of course)!

 

[Jeanette401]

I go with what Matt suggests - the only tweak I make is that if I say, roast vegetables in olive oil, and there's olive oil left behind, I might call it 50% to 75% of the amount I added. So, if I drizzle 3 tbls over the veggies, I count it as 1.5 tbs eaten because I'm not licking the olive oil from the foil