Counting calories

I don't always recommend being too obssessive compulsive about the food you eat, but for some people, calorie counting is the only thing that works for them when they're trying to stay healthy or lose a couple of pounds.

Calorie counting is fairly easy to do when everything comes in a package with a handy dandy nutrition label, but for the healthiest food -- fresh ingredients -- that's generally not the case.

The Hungry Girl once again comes to our rescue, explaining just how to keep track of nutrition information while preparing our own food:

Calculating nutritional information for recipes is actually a lot easier than you may think. It just requires a little math (hopefully you have a good calculator) and some patience. If you are any good at using Excel, that is a great way to organize your recipe calculations (especially since Excel has a built-in calculator).

All you need to do is carefully record EXACTLY what you use to make your recipe (that means the specific amounts of each ingredient). Then figure out the nutritional info for each of the ingredients, either by using the info on the package or looking up the food's info online in a database (my favorite place to
go is calorieking.com) -- this step requires your calculator, because you'll need to figure out the info for the EXACT amount of each ingredient in your recipe. Once you have all the nutritional info for EVERY ingredient, simply add them all together, and then divide the totals by the number of servings in your recipe, and VOILA -- you have your nutritional facts!

The only thing that gets tricky about it is if you need to figure out how many calories are in a tablespoon of something with a serving size that's given in ounces or cups. So keep a handy conversion chart around to help make that part easier.