Calorie Counting: How Many Calories Are In That, Anyway?

It's Saturday morning and you have settled in for a morning of watching one of your favorite cable stations, Food Network. You are watching Bobby, Rachael, Paula, Sunny and Tyler whip up their tasty treats and you see a recipe that literally makes your mouth water. You think you might already have half of the ingredients in the fridge, and the other half, you can easily pick up at the grocery store.

You turn on your computer and pull up the recipe on the Food Network website. In checking out the recipe, it seems simple enough, but then you see one important thing missing that is vital for you on your weight loss journey: nutitional information. Specifically, how many calories, how much fat, how much sodium is in that 5 ingredient fix or that 30 minute meal?

Now, you can figure out the nutritional information for your favorite recipes, thanks to SparkPeople.com. They have a tool on their website called The Receipe Calculator where you add the ingredients from your  recipe and they give you the estimated nutritional information of that recipe. I tried this for a recipe recently (which will be making its debut on the site in a few days--yay!). The pros: it did provide all of the information I was looking for as far as calories, fat, sodium, sugar, etc. The format even looked like the back of a package label. The cons: it is a little time consuming and sometimes, you have to convert measurements (i.e. turning cups into tablespoons--ugh! At least they do provide a conversion calculator as well).

Overall, I think it is a great tool. I am someone who is always watching Food Network and with the exception of Ellie Kreiger's show, they aren't very good with providing nutritional information on recipes.

Would you try the Recipe Calculator? Do you know of any others on the web?