How To Calculate Calories In Homemade Food I Count calories in home cooked meals
In this tutorial, Eric Roberts walks viewers through three tiers of methods for accurately counting calories in homemade meals. He begins by emphasizing the need for a solid foundation in basic calorie‑counting principles, then presents the best‑case workflow: weighing every ingredient in grams, determining portion sizes, and creating a custom recipe in MyFitnessPal to track exact calories per serving. He explains how to handle different serving scenarios (single meals, family portions, meal‑prep batches) and how to adjust servings within the app. Next, he offers a practical alternative for when raw weights aren’t feasible, introducing a cooked‑to‑raw multiplier (1.1‑1.5) to estimate raw weight from cooked food and how to log those values. Finally, he provides fallback strategies for low‑resource situations: the “one‑plate rule” (quarter protein, quarter carbs, half veg), educated guesstimation of portion sizes, over‑estimating to stay safe, and remembering to account for hidden calories like cooking oil. Throughout, he stresses consistency over perfection, encourages a supportive mindset, and points viewers to additional resources (a free calorie‑counting video and a written article).
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YouTube, what is going on? Hope you're doing super well. Welcome to the video. Welcome back to the channel. If you're watching this video right now, you're probably somewhat interested in learning how to count calories in homemade food. So it's exactly what I'm gonna teach you in this video. Before I go into anything else, if you don't know how to count calories in general, or even if you do, I have an entire free calorie counting video on YouTube here. I'll link that here above. You can check that out after this video. That is going to be almost a prerequisite to this video, 'cause if you don't know how to count calories already, and even if you do, I've seen so many people count calories incorrectly. So make sure you understand what I talk about in that video, 'cause it's gonna play a role in what we talk about here in this video. Okay? So that's first and foremost. Second, just very quickly, if you're wanting to watch this video right now, learning how to count calories in homemade food, that means you wanna count calories, you're trying to improve your body composition, you're trying to lose weight or gain muscle or whatever it is. I respect you a ton for that. I know it can be frustrating at times. I know it can be difficult at times. I know it's a learning process, but hopefully that's why I'm here to help you with that learning process. All right? So we're gonna cover 3 basic things in this video today. We're gonna talk about the best case scenario of how to count calories in homemade food. We're gonna talk about the next best option, how to count calories in homemade food. And the third thing is different methods to get the same results. And so we're gonna cover each one of these things very quickly. First, let's talk about the best-case scenario. And so I'm going to lay out piece by piece what this is going to look like. All right, so whether you're cooking at your own house or you're going over your in-laws, you're going to your aunt's, and there's just homemade food, right? I'm going to talk about the best-case scenario, and I, I know that the best-case scenario can't always happen, but if it can, I want to give you the guidelines for what that looks like in case you can do it. So number 1, You're going to want to weigh out all of your ingredients, all of your foods separately. So let's just say you're having 450 grams of raw chicken, 200 grams of uncooked rice, 100 grams of dry carrots, and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. And again, if you're confused with like why I'm using grams as opposed to like cups or ounces of chicken, for example, watch the calorie counting video. I explain it in there. Weighing in grams is the most accurate form of measurement, so you wanna be weighing your food in grams. So let's say you have those 4 ingredients. What you'd want to do is you would want to make sure you weigh out all of the ingredients that are going into the meal and make sure you include those cooking oils. Like for example, if you're using 2 tablespoons of cooking oil, which is, if you're making a big meal, it's probably not that much, right? So if you're including that, make sure you include that in the actual recipe because we're gonna make a recipe here in a second. So the second thing is going to be, now that you've weighed out and gotten all of your ingredients, you're going to want to determine your portion sizes. Now this is where sometimes it can get a bit tricky. Excuse me. It can get a bit tricky because let's say, for example, you're making muffins, right? Clearly the portion size of that is gonna be, if you make 10 muffins, the portion size is gonna be 10, right? If you make 4 cookies, the portion size is gonna be 4. 4 cookies, right? So you can manipulate it like that, but if you're having something where it's like a casserole or something along those lines, the lines get blurred a bit of what serving sizes are and so on and so forth. And so here's what I tell pretty much all of my online coaching clients is that let's say, you know, you're having what we just laid out, all those ingredients we laid out, you're just gonna put that into one big casserole, for example. Let's say you're having a meal for your family of 4. What I would do is I would simply determine the serving size, the portion size is 4. So it's gonna make 4 servings. That recipe is gonna make 4 servings because you want it to feed your family of 4. So now you know that is going to yield 4 servings, and we're gonna talk about how to portion out the serving sizes for yourself over here a bit later on here. But you now have determined you're gonna make 4 portion sizes, 4 serving sizes of this recipe. Now, let's say for example that you're cooking something that is only for you at that singular moment in time. Perfect. Well, all you're gonna do is the portion size is gonna be 1. So you just make all that and do all that, put it into a recipe, and it's gonna be 1 serving size right there, right? So that can be different. Or let's say you're making something that's gonna last you, you know, 4 lunches worth. At that point, what you can do is you can say, hey, I'm still gonna put the portion size for 4 because I know it's gonna last me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday lunch. So you're not going to eat it all at once, right? So that's what you can do. And as well, you could make it like, for example, you could make it one serving size and just make the one big thing. But what you can do is when you go and enter it, you can make it a 1/4 of a serving. And again, we'll talk about that here in a second when we get to determining your portion size. Right now, so for the rest of this, we are going to be using the calorie counting app called MyFitnessPal. Um, there's other various different apps you can use. It should all be the same exact thing, honestly, for all this. But you know, I'm going to use MyFitnessPal in this example because that's what myself and my clients, uh, use during, during our coaching. And so basically what you're gonna do is you're just gonna input all the ingredients, input the serving size, input the portion sizes into MyFitnessPal, and you're gonna create a recipe from that. So basically what you can do is you can go to your— it'll say diary, and then it'll say add food, right? So you can add food, click the top right-hand corner, and you'll be able to add a recipe. And you'll just go piece by piece what we kind of already talked about here. You're gonna create your own recipe in MyFitnessPal and to where you can now be able to track these calories that you had, that you've already weighed out and so on and so forth. Now it comes time to determine your portion size and how many calories you specifically are eating. So what you can do now is since you've already put the recipe into MyFitnessPal, it's already in your database. What you can do is you can go to diary, you can go to add food, you can click on recipes and simply just click your recipe. Now it's going to ask you how many servings of this recipe are you having? So again, let's say that you've made a recipe and it's, you know, it comes out to 10 muffins. If you have 2 muffins, you put the serving size as 2 and you're gonna have 2 servings of that and that's gonna automatically calculate your calories for you. Bam, good to go. If you are having something more where it's like a casserole or stuffed peppers or something like that, you can, what you can do here is say, hey, okay, I put the serving sizes for 4, my 2 kids are gonna eat a half serving size each, right? So they're gonna, you know, that's gonna become 1. Now, between you and your husband or you and your spouse or whoever, you're now gonna have a half serving and a half serving. So you can make that, you can tweak that to say, hey, I'm having 1.5 servings of this recipe. That's what I personally am consuming. That's how many calories I personally am eating. And let's say, for example, you go to put in a serving and a half, but you only eat, you know, a serving and a quarter. Sweet. Just modify the serving sizes in your MyFitnessPal and you will be good to go. Now again, let's say you make this food and it's only for yourself and you're gonna have half at dinner and you're gonna have half at lunch. Perfect. What you'll do is just when you go to input serving sizes, you can just put in, I had half of this recipe then, half of this recipe now. Either way, it gets eaten altogether. So whether you have it at breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner or lunch this day and dinner the next day, as long as all the food gets eaten, you're gonna eat all those calories that are in that recipe. So either way, the calorie count is going to be accurate and you will be good to go. So that is the best case scenario. And I, again, I know that everybody can't do that and that's okay, but if you can do that, that would be your best case scenario. Now let's go to next best case scenario. And that is going to be simply the most accurate way to weigh your food is, and count your calories is going to be weighing your food raw, whether it's, you know, raw chicken or uncooked rice or whatever it is, that's going to be the most accurate. But that being said, you can still track your calories afterwards. Just specify that you're having 100 grams of a cooked grilled chicken breast. Specify you're having 75 grams of, you know, cooked steamed white jasmine rice. This way, if you weigh, if you weigh out your food after, you know that you've had 75 grams of cooked jasmine rice. Just input that into your MyFitnessPal and you will be good to go. Just make sure that you specify that. Now, Some people are gonna ask me, you know, what's the difference between cooked meat and raw meat, for example. You can just simply say, hey, I'm gonna weigh out this cooked meat and I'm gonna make sure I input it as cooked meat, or what you can do is you can say, hey, I'm going to use this multiplier scale. 'Cause basically what you can do is with cooked food, excuse me, and raw food, there can be a multiplier where when you cook the food, it loses water weight. Right, so let's say you have 100 grams of a well-done, like dry to the bone chicken breast. There's this multiplier that goes from 1.1 to 1.5. 1.5 is like the well-done, you are like almost burning it, and then 1.1 is like, this is like rare steak, right? So you can fall between this 1.1 to 1.5 line. So let's just say, for example, you have 100 grams of like very well-done, almost burnt chicken breast. What you can do is say, hey, I'm gonna multiply 100 times 1.5, and that will give you the raw— a good estimate of the raw calculations of that meat. So let's say you have 100 grams of very well-done chicken breast, multiply 100 times 1.5, that should probably be about 150 grams of a raw, uncooked chicken breast. Let's say you have 105 grams of a medium-rare steak. You, you weighed it out after and it's about 105 grams. What you can do here is say, okay, I'm gonna multiply 105 times 1.2, because again, the multiplying scale goes from 1.1 to 1.5. 1.5 is very well done, very well done cooked, almost burnt. 1.1 is rare. So if you have a medium-rare steak of 105 grams, 105 times 1.2 is about 126 grams of a raw uncooked steak. So you can also track your calories that way if you would like to as well. Last but not least, listen, I know sometimes you're not, you're not gonna have your food scale with you. You're not gonna be able to weigh things out. You're not gonna be able to do those calculations and conversions. And, you know, maybe you're eating at somebody else's house where they don't have, they didn't tell you the recipe and you can't, you know, plan those things out. First and foremost, it's all good. Don't freak out because this is not about being perfect. This is just about being consistent. So, I don't need you and you don't need yourself to be perfect every single time because, again, what's the whole reason you're counting calories anyway? It's 'cause you wanna make sure you control your calorie intake and be either in a calorie deficit, calorie maintenance, or calorie surplus, right? Whichever one you're trying to go for. But if you're— let's just say you're trying to be in a calorie deficit. The biggest thing is not the exact foods, it's more the overall total calories. So what you can do is just use different strategies, use different ways to where if you can't weigh your food on a food scale, that's okay. That's not the end of the world. You don't have to be perfect. There are multiple other ways you can track your calories, quote unquote. Like for example, one of the best things I've ever done with my online coaching clients is we have this one plate rule. So the one plate rule is no matter what you eat— dropped my marker— no matter what you eat, you have to fit the food on one plate. About 1/4 to 1/2 of that plate has to be protein, about 1/2 of that plate has to be vegetables, and the other 1/4 of the plate can be carbohydrates, right? If you follow this one plate rule, you are automatically going to Limit your overall total calorie intake because you can only eat but so many calories if you stick to one plate. If 1/4 of the plate is protein, 1/4 of the plate is carbs, and 1/2 of the plate is vegetables, you can only eat but so many calories, right? So you're still getting the job done. You're still accomplishing and achieving the goal you set out for yourself to make sure you're in a total overall calorie deficit intake. Second thing as well, if you've been counting calories like I told you in that video, If you've been counting calories correctly, you're probably going to get better over time of guesstimating how many calories you're intaking. In a situation like this where you do not have your food scale, you can't weigh it out, you don't know the ingredients, you can guesstimate. My 2 cents would be the more you count calories correctly with a food scale, the better you're going to get at situations like this. So when these situations pop up, you won't lose your mind or freak out, which is A massive benefit of counting calories legit for a short period of time, but what you can do is just guesstimate. So you can look at rice and say, that's probably about 100 grams of rice. You can look at a piece of chicken and say, that's probably about 125 grams of chicken breast. And my 2 cents would be just overestimate. So if you think it's 100 grams, put 115 grams. If you think that's 500 calories, put it as 600 calories, 'cause if you overestimate, you're never gonna go wrong. You're always gonna either— you're always gonna err on the side of caution. You'll always set yourself up for success. 'Cause if it's more than that, great, you've already accounted for that. If it's less than that, great, you've eaten less calories than what you think you did. So using those 2 methods, using the one plate rule, guesstimating to the best of your ability, also making sure you take into consideration things like cooking oils. I talked about that earlier, but that's such a sneaky way for people to add in calories and forget calories, right? Like a tablespoon of olive oil is 120 calories. So if you're doing that, just make sure if you're going out to eat somewhere or whatnot, you can factor that into your total calories. And so that's what I would say. You know, it all comes down to, you do not have to be perfect. This is not a game of perfection. And don't— I'm not going to let you sit here and use that as an excuse for you to just go, you know, fucking binge eat on pasta or pizza or whatever it is. Cause oh, well you can't be perfect. So you might as well say fuck it altogether. No, that's not okay. And that's not a valid excuse. And I'm not going to let you use that as a valid excuse. Any longer. So do the best you can, make the best of the scenario you can. Also, by the way, I wrote an entire article on this as well. So if you think it might be easier for you to kind of like go back and reference an article, I'll link that here in the description below. Feel free to go check that out. But these are my 3 best ways to count calories in homemade food. I hope it helped you. If you have any questions, any concerns, please feel free to drop below. Other than that, thank you for watching the video. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please feel free to give a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. Other than that, thank you as always, and we will talk soon.
