How do I track home-cooked food?

Weigh ingredients raw, save the whole dish as a recipe with a serving count, then pull portions from it. That turns many entries per meal into one.

Should I weigh rice and pasta raw or cooked?

Raw is simpler and more reliable. Cooking adds water, which raises the weight but not the calories. Weighing cooked requires matching database entries.

Do I need to track spices?

Usually not. Spices, herbs and vinegar barely register. Oil and butter do: one tablespoon of oil is around 90 calories.

How do I split a dish into portions?

Either with a fixed serving count in the recipe or, more precisely, by taking the cooked total weight and your plate weight and working out the ratio.

Home/FAQ/Nutrition

Tracking home-cooked meals: the simplest method

Paul Hummel Last reviewed September 14, 2026 4 min read

Quick answer

The trick is to log the whole pot and then divide it, rather than recalculating every serving. Weigh ingredients raw, save it once as a recipe, then just pull portions. Five minutes once, one tap forever after.

Why barcodes do not help here

A barcode scanner is quick for packaged products — for a home-made bolognese it does nothing. That is exactly why many people stop tracking when they cook from scratch, even though that is the healthier option.

The method: log the pot, then divide

Weigh and log ingredients raw. Raw, not cooked — rice and pasta absorb water while cooking, which changes the weight but not the calories.
Save it as a recipe with the number of servings, e.g. "Bolognese, 4 portions".
Pull portions. From then on every meal is one entry.

If you know the cooked total weight, you can be more precise: weigh the pot, weigh your plate, and take the ratio. That only pays off for dishes where portions vary a lot.

What you can leave out

Spices, herbs, a splash of vinegar, stock cubes — the contribution is too small to justify the effort. Oil is not in that group. One tablespoon is around 90 calories, and frying often takes two or three. If you weigh exactly one ingredient, make it the fat.

The side effect

People who set up a handful of standard meals as recipes tend to keep tracking far longer — because the daily effort drops to a few taps. Alternatively, some apps take a plain description: "plate of bolognese with about 100 g of pasta dry". GymLog AI works that way.

Log a home-cooked meal in one sentence

GymLog AI turns your description into calories and macros – and captures your training too.

Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play

Sources

GymLog AI on the App Store and Google Play (features & pricing). apps.apple.com · play.google.com

Third-party feature and price details reflect the time of review (September 2026) and may change; please check the respective app store. This content is for general informational purposes.