Have you ever made a casserole or baked muffins and wondered how many calories or macros you were eating per serving? If you are trying to lose weight, knowing exactly what you are eating and how much you are eating is important. The only way to really know what you are eating is to know the nutritional value of the food that you consume.
If you are comfortable using the website or app called MyFitnessPal (MFP) or a food tracking website or app that is similar, you can input your recipes and ingredients into the recipes tool and from there, MFP will do all the math for you.
However, if you do not have access to MFP or are not comfortable navigating it, you can still figure out the caloric and macros value using basic math.
You start with getting all your ingredients out and finding the nutritional label on each one. Some items such as spices, baking soda and baking soda do not need to be calculated.
Let’s use the flour nutrition label below as an example. Let’s say you are making a muffin recipe that yields 12 muffins. It calls for 2 cups of flour. As per the label, each serving of 1/2 cup (125mL) results in 150 calories and the macros listed for protein, fats and carbohydrates. Because you need 2 cups of it, you would multiply each of the calories, protein, fats, and carbohydrates by 4 (because there are 4 servings of flour in your recipe that is calling for 2 cups).
This results in the following:
150calories X 4 = 600 calories
12g protein X 4 = 48g protein
0.5g fat X 4 = 2g fat
25g carbohydrates X 4 = 100g carbohydrates
You would continue this basic math for ALL of the ingredients in your recipe (ie. eggs, sugar, oats, fruit, chocolate chips, honey, applesauce, etc). When you have completed this, you add up each section of calories and macros separately and you will have a total of calories and a total of all separate macros (proteins/fats/carbs) for this entire recipe.
Next, you divide each of these numbers (the total calories, protein, fats, carbs) by 12 because the recipe yields 12 muffins. The number that you receive for the calories and each macros, is your nutritional value per muffin. From there, you can determine how many to eat based on what your caloric and macros goal is for the day (along with all the other foods you are consuming during that day)
Have any questions about this? Feel free to contact me.
