Before we jump into too much healthy goodness on the videos I wanted to take one quick video to answer a question that a lot of you guys asked on Instagram and YouTube and that is, how do you calculate nutrition of recipes? So today I'm going to show you exactly how I do it and on Thursday you will have your first new recipe video and I promise you don't want to miss it. There are of course other ways to calculate out the nutrition but I'm just going to show you the easiest way that works for me. And here's a quick tutorial. Okay, so we’re going to start on myfitnesspal. You do need a username to log in but it is free to make it. If you've never used myfitnesspal it is also an app and it's a really great way to track your calories, your macro nutrients, everything. And if you're interested in learning how to track your macros you can check out my IIFYM tutorial. But today I'm just going to show you how to calculate nutrition for a recipe so once you're logged in you're going to go to Food. And under Food you're going to go to Recipes.
And you have a recipe box where you can keep any recipe you've ever calculated nutrition for ever. Now you can input the recipe in two ways. With this recipe importer you can use the URL. So for instance, if you go to my website and today, I just posted these low fat fudgy brownies. I can copy the URL and paste it and import the recipe. And it is going to pull all of the ingredients. So if we look you'll see three quarters cup nonfat plain Greek yogurt blah blah - everything is right there, right? Now great if you are - if you do have access to the recipe on website but if you don't - going to go back do it again - you can add the recipe manually and it's going to take you to the same thing. So let's just do that ourselves here. We’re going to copy these ingredients. So this is great if you, for instance, make your own recipe. If you just make something up one night and you want to know what the nutrition is for your dinner you can do this yourself.
We have to add a recipe name so we're going to call them low fat fudgy brownies and how many servings. I know that these are sixteen. It tells me that and that is what I had determined previously. So before we match the ingredients it is important to make some modifications to whatever you have input because the computer is going to guess what those ingredients are. So, for instance, if I wanted to be really specific about what my ingredients were, so I was 100% sure that I'm getting the right nutrition, I would specify that this is unsweetened light almond milk. For the oat flour I don't need this extra information. It's just going to confuse the computer and rather than oat flour, I'm going to make it easy and just say that I used old fashioned rolled oats.
Whoops! Cocoa powder, stevia I know is zero calorie. If you use something else, if you use coconut sugar or a blend you'll definitely want to keep that in there but if it's no calorie I'm not even going to bother with it. Same with the salt and baking powder. And the dark chocolate chips are optional. I'm going to include them for this calculation but we don't need the word optional. So I have my ingredients there. Everything is set up. Now we can match the ingredients.
Once we click that it will take you to this page where it gives you a beginning guesstimate but we have to make sure that everything is right. And this is where you do have to use your brain just a little bit and your intuition, your kind of previous nutrition - nutritional knowledge - if you will, to make sure that all these things are accurate. So sometimes, for instance, when I put in the word peanut butter, it'll just pull regular butter and that's not right. So you want to double check all of your ingredients. So this looks about right and if I wanted to go in and change the exact brand; so let's say I wanted to replace this with nonfat plain Greek yogurt from Chobani, I can do that. And here, this one right here, I can choose one cup. It's three quarters of one cup and as you see it's about the same; 98 calories, 101 calories, 8.17, 6.17 so it's pretty close.
It's not going to make a huge difference in the final calculation but if you want it to be specific with your brand you can totally do that. Same thing if you realize oh this is actually not supposed to be a half cup or whatever you can edit the quantity or you can remove it completely. So we don't actually want to do that right now. We’ve got a large egg, applesauce and oh! These are wrong so I know from my previous nutritional knowledge that one tablespoon of dark chocolate chips is not 18 calories. That would be great. At least the ones that I use weren't. So I'm going to replace this with Toll House semi sweet mini morsels because this is what I used in these brownies and let's see it found them. Mini chocolate semi sweet mor...these are probably the same thing. One tablespoon, let's see it. Yeah, 70 calories, that's correct. So I know that that's correct because I've used this product before. Everything is right. Here's the new guesstimate - 38 calories - I can click save. Alright so now in my recipe box I have this low fat fudgy brownies.
I can click that and see the entire nutrition. It'll give me the calories, the macro and micro nutrients. So you've got one gram of fat, six grams of carbs, two grams of protein. I don't so much follow the micro nutrients especially if you're not going to input the specific brands because it's probably not accurate. But for macros it is great. Now if you ever want to remake this recipe or let's say, the last time I made it with the mini morsels, but this time I don't really think I need them. You can always come back to your recipe box.
You can edit the recipe and let's say I want to take these out so that I know how many calories every single brownie is without those morsels. Here it is: 33. I save it again and I can click my recipe box once more and here is the revised nutrition so as you see it didn't change that much. One gram of carbs and a few calories but there you go. That is exactly how you calculate it out and then every time you sign back in you can always access it again in My Fitness Pal in recipes.
It will be there waiting for you. So I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Please give it a thumbs up if you did. If you have any other tutorial ideas or general video ideas or requests please leave them in the comments below. And as promised from the Kickstart series there is a PDF download available in the description box below. I am going to keep those going. And remember there is a new recipe video on Thursday. It is one of my favorite recipes right now. You do not want to miss it. I hope you guys have a great week and thanks for spending a few minutes on your Monday with me.
