Calculating Macros for Any Dish

About Me

I have been tracking my calories for about 5 years at this point. This started off as my vain quest to lose weight and look good. I’ve reach reasonable levels of success, reaching decent levels of leanness and vascularity. Nothing crazy like physique competition stage-ready, more around 9-10% body fat.

When I first started, I literally weighed everything meticulously. I would pull the kitchen scale out at every meal and portion lunches and snacks I brought to work. Then I would enter all the nutritional information into MyFitnessPal. This consumed an unreasonable portion of my waking hours and it wasn’t even that accurate.

Overtime, I developed an intuitive sense at estimating portion sizes. And an encyclopedic reference of common foods and their macronutrient values.

I’ve learned some of tips and tricks and I only spend about 5 minutes a day to track my macros. I calculate my macros mid-day and this gives me information to react and change meal choices for the remainder of the day. This works well for me, as I adopt a uf it fits your macros (IIFYM) approach:

• planning to order pizza tonight; guess I’m going light on lunch and keep carbs low
• had leafy salad with vinaigrette and chicken breast for lunch; I’ve saved up enough deficit to treat myself to instant ramen

Tips for Tracking Macros

Don’t Sweat the Little Things

Focus on precision with calorie-dense foods, don’t waste energy on the little things. Give it a good guess and rely on average in errors.

Underestimating a 4 cups of salad to be 3 cups is 30 calorie margin of error. Underestimating 3 tablespoon of salad dressing to be only 2 is a 100 calorie error. We can probably agree that it’s very hard to distinguish 2 from 3 tablespoons of liquid.

Use Substitute Foods for Tracking

The difference between white bread + butter and focaccia is very little. Optimize minimizing time spent on the tracking app by using food items you’re familiar with and extrapolating them.

For soups, use chicken noodle soup and scale up as needed. Or use a cream soup to approximate richer soups.

If it comes down to it, use pure macronutrients to tweak the ratios:

• egg white basically 100% protein, although you need to do some maths since it’s 90% water
• oil is 100% fat
• white sugar is 100% carbohydrate

Accept Large Margin Of Error

Following the 80/20 rule, you will not get much more out of tracking macros unless you dedicate more of your waking hours to it. The human body fluctuates with variance, making it impossible to get even 95% accurate TDEE prediction. Foods have variance in composition of ingredients every time they’re prepared.

You should learn to accept large variance in all your calculations and hope their margins of errors balance each other. Learning to adapt and react during your diet journey will yield more success with less effort, than turning food intake into a chemistry lab.

Estimating Macros for an Recipe

Sometimes it’s hard to find macros for dishes that are not mass-produced.

How much protein is in a Burmese tea leaf salad? What about a dim sum?

In these situations, sometimes it’s helpful to look up recipes to get a rough approximation of the ingredient composition. Once we have a list of the ingredients, it’s straight-forward to calculate the total macros for the dish. Then we approximate once more, to get the macros for the serving size.

I use a verywellfit recipe calculator to determine the macros for a recipe. It parses a list of ingredients quite well, needing some manual editing for some ingredients.

The goal of using this calculator is not to get exact macros. It’s to get a sense of the composition. You’ll notice that similar food end up with similar macro proportions.