Ok, I am driving myself half insane about this and I really could do with some advice.

Having not given a hoot about cals and food content half my life (hence why I'm in this pickle) I now find myself obsessed and completely confused.

Yes we all know that home cooking from fresh ingredients is far better for you as no chemicals etc etc but how the eck do you know what sort of cal content the portion you decide to dish up would be?!?! If I go for a low fat, ready meal at least I know exactly from a calorie sense what I'm putting in my body. How the hell am I supposed to do that with home cooking? Help! :tongue2:

I measure as I cook and then use an online calculator like Sparkpeople.com to calculate the total cals/protein in the whole dish then divide by the number of portions. I will make a chicken dish and put it is 8 glad ware containers; then during the week I know that when I eat what is in that container I have eaten 220 cals/22 grams of protein.

I'm not sure I get the source of your frustration, so if this doesn't help, let me know.

Any good you buy other than fresh produce & some meats has nutritional information on it, right? (I think, anyway) Including serving amount, calories, carbohydrates, fat, etc. The produce information can be easily found online.

So just add up whatever you're putting into your meal. E.g. you're making a stirfry. Your bag of stirfry veggies says 1/2C is a serving. The values are listed per serving, so you know the calroies in your veggies. Same with sauce & meat. Or if you cook the whole thing, just add up the total calories, and estimte (fairly) how much of it you're taking. So if you make a big wok of stirfry and you know the total calories in it is 1000, and you take 1/5 of it, you know you have roughly 200 calories.

There is a stickied list of food values in the Food forum that may help.

Also see this post (linking rather than retyping): http://www.lapbandtalk.com/f15/protein-carbs-fat-43231/#post594400

You can also plug all your foods into an online calculator (e.g. fitday) but I personally prefer to just do the math. I can add it up in my head as I go a lot faster than I can get online, pull up the site, search for foods or enter values, etc. Though I do love fitday's long-term weightloss grid.

I go to fitday.com as well. There's a large nutritional database of all types of food and a feature that allows you to customize and add your own food and nutritional info. All you have to do is select the food eaten and the portion and it does all the work for you.

I also, downloaded a Recipe Calculator program last night that gives you 20 days free trial. It really is a good program. If you want to keep it after the 20 days it's approx. $25. I made a ground turkey and turkey sausage chili with Beans last night and wanted something to not only calculate the recipe but be able to reference the recipe next time I'd try to recreate it because I was making it up as I went along. It also has a large nutritional fact database and customizable food feature. It also, allows you to e-mail the recipe, send to a website and store it. I put in a few of my favorite old recipes to gauge the nutritional facts and also checked what serving size I could eat without tweaking the recipe as well as tweaking the recipe to allow me a larger serving. If interested the website is RecipeCalc.com

Hi:

If you don't want to count calories you could try counting weight watcher points. If you don't know anyone with an old weight watcher booklet that tells the points values, you could join just for a month or so to get all of the materials to be able to count the points.

I don't actually count calories, and I think because I walk so much it's not an issue. I've been pretty successful so far. If you try to stick to eating less than a cup of food with each meal you probably won't need to count calories.

Hope this works for you, or that you find an easier method than counting calories.

Sue

Well I got around this by never measuring or counting calories. I tend to believe that its counterproductive and only encourages more of that obsessive diet mentality we all want to escape.

I know roughly what I eat, I cant help adding it up in my head. But really, I wouldnt have a CLUE how many calories are in some things I cook. I just know if I dont overeat and I keep exercising my weight will remain stable. Avoid unhealthy foods, dont fry or add too much fat, too many carbs, eat good quality fresh ingredients, use healthy recipes and its really not necessary to count calories.

I also try to stick four or five nights a week to good basic meals - a Protein such as a small piece of chicken, steak, roast lamb etc, a starch like potato (which I often give to the family but skip myself) and a load of steamed veges, as many colours as you can include. That will ALWAYS be a healthy, low fat, appropriate meal. I keep to this sort of menu because otherwise I find I cook too much Pasta and that sort of thing and we dont eat enough fresh vegetables

.

But you can always just cook from cookbooks with nutritional information panels with the recipes - I have tons of those.