How to Count Calories in Meals Prepared at Home

Determining calories in each food you consume is a means of maintaining a healthy body weight and dietary requirements for your and your family. While often calories are stated by the manufacturer when eating out or on packaged premade meals, counting calories for meals created at home can be challenging, for it requires each ingredient to be added in to the whole calorie count, and there are often extra calories, added by sauces or other condiments, that are not even considered. With some patience and math, calories in meals prepared at home can be easily determined to help meet health or diet goals.

Things You'll Need

• Food scale
• Calculator

Show More

Instructions

• 1

  Determine the calories of each ingredient. Use the food scale, online resources such as calculators (found in the resources section of this article) or on packaging to figure out how many calories each ingredient contains.

• 2

  Measure the amount of food to be used in the recipe. Write down each amount, then write the corresponding amount of calories next to it. For example, if 2 cups of a food item is 100 calories, but you are only using 1 cup, write down 50 calories next to the food group on your list.

• 3

  Add the amount of calories on your list together, either by hand or using a calculator. Write down the final figure on the paper.

• 4

  Determine how many people will be consuming your meal.

• 5

  Divide the overall caloric number of the meal by the amount of people consuming it. This will be the final amount for each portion of the meal.