How to Macro Track - Meals and Bulk Cooking

Meal prep makes things super easy but sometimes it's challenging to figure out how to track the various portions you eat throughout the week. This post will walk you through how use a recipe to track food cooked in bulk so you can easily input it throughout the week. This will save you the hassle of manually calculating the raw vs. cooked weight conversion of foods and makes it easy to track a serving size no matter how big or small.

This method doesn't just work for things you meal prep but also bigger meals you cook like dinner. When I make dinner for my husband and I, this is how I track what I make so I can easily track both my portion I eat for dinner as well as any leftovers I eat.

1. The easiest way I've found to track a bulk batch of food is to create a recipe in MyFitnessPal for the batch you are cooking. I've put screenshots below showing how this is done.

2. When I create the recipe, I start by tracking it as one serving. I will go back and update this later so this number doesn't matter.

For my example, I'm batch cooking chicken breast.

3. Once the recipe is created, add all the food you are cooking in the recipe. This will include a) the raw weight of the meat, potato, vegetables etc. you are cooking, b) any cooking oil you are using and c) any sauces you're using. Make sure when you are looking up the ingredients in MyFitnessPal you are looking for the raw ingredients since that's when you're weighing them.

I'm cooking a 450g package of chicken breast in 1 tbsp of olive oil so this is what I will input into my recipe.

4. Once you've inputted the ingredients you can save the recipe and finish cooking you're food. When you're food is cooked you will need to weigh the total quantity. The easiest way to do this is to take the container you are going to store your food in and put it on your scale, zero out your scale and fill the container. You will now take that total weight and input it into your recipe as the serving size. This means your recipe now has the macros for 1g of your cooked food.

My chicken weighed 380g cooked so I change my recipe serving size to be 380. I now know that 1g of my cooked chicken is 0.3g protein, 0g carbs

and 0g fat.

5. When you eat your food during the week, you will use the number of grams you eat as the serving size.

I ate 90g of my cooked chicken, there I used a serving size of 90 to track what I ate.

The recipes save in MyFitnessPal so every time you make them you can update them with the quantities you are cooking with and the updated serving size.

Happy cooking!