Nutrition
How to Count Calories in Homemade Indian Food
App entries for Indian dishes are unreliable. This method is more accurate.
Short answer
Do not search for the dish. Build your own recipe once. Weigh the raw ingredients, weigh the cooked pot, and log your serve by weight.
When you search for dal in a calorie app, you get many entries with very different numbers.
None of them matches your recipe.
Why the app is wrong
Each entry was added by someone else, using their own amount of oil, water and serving size.
Your recipe is different, so picking from the list is a guess.
The method
Log the raw ingredients
Before you cook, weigh what goes in. The lentils, the oil, the onions, the paneer. Enter each one in the app as a recipe. Raw ingredients have reliable entries.
Weigh the cooked pot
When it is done, weigh the whole thing. Weigh the empty pot first and subtract it. Now you know the total weight and the total calories.
Log your serve by weight
Put your bowl on the scale and serve. If the pot was 1200 grams and your bowl is 300 grams, you ate a quarter of it.
That is it. Most apps let you save the recipe. Next time you only weigh your bowl.
Measure the oil
This is where most of the error hides. One tablespoon of oil or ghee is about 120 calories 1. A free pour can easily be three.
Use a measuring spoon for the tadka. It takes five seconds.
What about roti
Weigh the dry atta for the batch. Count the rotis you made. Divide. If you put ghee on top, log that too.
Eating at someone else's house
You cannot weigh the food at someone else's house.
Pick the closest entry. Add a spoon of oil to the entry, since home cooking usually has more than the app assumes. One estimated meal does not undo a week of good tracking.
You do not have to do this forever
Track properly for two or three weeks. You will learn what your portions really are. After that you can usually eyeball it.
The goal is to learn your own portions, not to track forever.
What to remember
- Do not search for the dish. Enter your own recipe once.
- Weigh the raw ingredients, then the cooked pot.
- Log your bowl by weight, not by guess.
- Measure the oil. That is where the error hides.
- Two or three weeks of tracking is enough to learn your portions.
Want this built around your own week?
A free call. No pressure, no card.
Tanvi Parikh. Certified Fitness Coach (NASM CPFT, CSFNS) and founder of TNV Method.
Sources
TNV Method is coaching and education, not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before changing medication or starting a new plan.