Calculate the total calories in any meal by adding ingredients with their serving sizes. Get per-serving breakdown with protein, carbs, and fat totals.
This worksheet totals calories and macros from individual ingredients, then divides the recipe into servings. It is meant for home cooking, meal prep, and recipe logging when you want a reusable per-serving number.
The built-in ingredient data helps with quick estimates, but the main advantage is simple arithmetic: once the ingredients and serving count are entered, the page gives a consistent total and per-serving breakdown for the recipe. It is a practical estimate, not a substitute for a package label or laboratory analysis.
Ingredient-based calculation is usually more repeatable than eyeballing a finished dish. This page helps you build a consistent nutrition number for meals you make often.
Ingredient Calories = (Calories per 100g × Amount in grams) / 100 Total Meal Calories = ∑ (each ingredient's calories) Total Protein = ∑ (each ingredient's protein) Total Carbs = ∑ (each ingredient's carbs) Total Fat = ∑ (each ingredient's fat) Per Serving = Total / Number of Servings
Result: 421 kcal per serving
Chicken: 500g × 165/100 = 825 kcal. Rice: 400g × 123/100 = 492 kcal. Broccoli: 300g × 34/100 = 102 kcal. Olive oil: 30g × 884/100 = 265 kcal. Total: 1,684 kcal. Divided by 4 servings: 421 kcal per serving. This is a solid meal prep recipe yielding about 420 calories, ~45g protein, ~40g carbs, and ~12g fat per serving.
Home-cooked meals are easier to standardize because you can measure ingredients before cooking and save the result for later. That makes them better suited to repeatable tracking than meals assembled in a restaurant kitchen.
Meal prepping with calculated nutrition is a straightforward strategy for consistent calorie control. By cooking a batch recipe and dividing it into equal portions, you reduce daily decision-making and estimation errors.
The most common mistakes are not counting cooking oils and fats, not weighing ingredients, using cooked weights with raw calorie data, and forgetting sauces or condiments. A digital food scale eliminates most of those errors.
Over time, the most efficient approach is to save your frequent recipes and reuse them. That gives you a personal nutrition library for the meals you make most often.
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This worksheet multiplies each ingredient's calorie value per 100 g by the entered gram amount, sums the recipe total, and divides by the serving count. It is best used with weighed ingredients and values from a recognized food database or package label. The result is a practical planning estimate for home cooking, not a nutrition-label substitute for branded foods.
The most reliable source is the USDA FoodData Central database (fdc.nal.usda.gov). You can also use food packaging labels — just convert to per-100g if listed per serving. Our built-in quick-add database covers the most common cooking ingredients. For branded products, check the manufacturer's nutrition label.
Always weigh raw/uncooked for the most accurate results. Cooking changes weight (meat loses water, rice/pasta absorbs water) but not calorie content. If you must weigh cooked food, use calorie values specifically for the cooked version. A raw chicken breast at 165 kcal/100g will have about 190–200 kcal/100g when cooked due to water loss.
Weigh the total finished product in grams. Enter the total recipe nutrition, then weigh individual portions. For example, if your soup totals 2,000g and 1,200 calories, each 500g bowl is (500/2000) × 1,200 = 300 calories. This weight-based method is more accurate than estimating number of servings.
Yes — cooking oils are calorie-dense (around 884 kcal/100g or ~120 kcal per tablespoon). Even small amounts add significant calories. Measure oil with a tablespoon or weigh it. If you're air-frying or grilling instead of pan-frying, the calorie reduction from skipping oil can be substantial.
Very accurate, especially when weighing with a digital scale. The USDA estimates a ±5–10% margin of error for food composition data. The biggest sources of error are guessing portions without weighing and forgetting to count cooking fats, sauces, or condiments. Weighing everything reduces error to near the database's inherent margin.
Absolutely — this is one of the best use cases. Enter your full recipe, set servings to however many meal prep containers you're filling, and you get exact per-container nutrition. This lets you plan meals that fit your daily macro and calorie targets precisely, eliminating guesswork throughout the week.
Cooking methods generally don't change the calorie content of the food itself — they only change water content (affecting weight). The exception is adding fat: deep frying adds calories from absorbed oil. Baking, grilling, steaming, and boiling don't add calories. Always count added oils, butter, or sauces as separate ingredients.
Most dry spices are negligible: even a full tablespoon of most spices is under 10 calories. Salt has zero calories. You can safely ignore dry spices in your calculations. However, watch out for spice blends with sugar (BBQ rubs), premade sauces (teriyaki, BBQ, ranch), and oil-based seasonings — these can add meaningful calories.