How to Track Macros for Homemade Recipes
Tracking your macros may sound easy enough when you are cooking for just 1 person and the meal has 3 ingredients.
What about if you are cooking for a family of 4 and have 10 ingredients?
Obviously things get a bit more complicated.
But I promise you it’s not impossible.
Let’s go over the steps involved of how you can still track your macros but not miss out on a home cooked meal with your family.
When you track the macros of home cooked recipes you want to do the follow:
Cut up and weigh out your ingredients separately (example, cut up onion, weigh onions on food scale, THEN cook them as you normally would).
Make sure you write down how much each ingredient weighed. (example, onion were 100g, peppers were 80g, chicken was 200g and sauce was 6 tbsp).
Then google the fats, carbs, protein (or look at the back of the label if provided) of each ingredient. (example if you google the macros for an onion, then right down the total fats, carbs and protein for 100g of your weighed out onion).
Do this for every single ingredient
You will have totals for each ingredient for their fats, carbs and protein
Add up the total fats, carbs and protein. This will give you the macros for the entire dish
Then you need to guesstimate the total servings available from the entire dish. Maybe it makes 4? Depends on the recipe you are using?
You take the total fats, carbs and protein you added up in step 6 and then you divide that by the total servings available you determined in step 7. That is the macros for a single serving and the amount of macros you will use to track your dinner
So if the recipe has the following ingredients, here is what it would look like (the macros below are not accurate, just example). Assume that the recipe makes up 4 servings
Protein. Carbs Fat
100g of potatoes 15g 80g 5g
100g of broccoli 3g 15g 1g
200g of chicken 40g 5g 2g
5tbsp of sauce 1g 50g 2g
Total macros 59g 150g 10g
Divide by 4 14.75g 37.5g 2.5g
These totals are the macros for one serving you would use
Here’s a video if you need a visual of how to complete this process
Hope this helps. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!
Coach Krys