I'd like to consider myself pretty good at estimating/guessing the calories in foods.
It just seems like for the ingredients, that most HelloFresh meals have way more calories than it seems like they should??? lol maybe I'm just in denial or something or underestimating the ingredient/sneaky added things adding up, etc. but idk it seems like some of these should not be over 1000cal for 1 serving 😭.
by Ships_Bravery
11 Comments
No that seems too much! I’d use my fitness pal to calculate the calories.
Does it call for using olive oil or cooking oil? I think sometimes it calculates in “2 Tbsp” of oil which adds a lot- but that’s just my guess!
I think it’s the sad reality involved with pasta
I think the sausage is likely bumping this into the higher range at least on the one in the pics.
I think they lean on the high side because they don’t know how much oil/butter/cheese/sauce people use. Like my “drizzle of oil” could be much different than what someone else will use.
Sometimes I just break it down and do my own calorie count.
I’ve gotten a nearly identical meal from everyplate for the pork sausage rigatoni with the only difference being penne instead of rigatoni pasta, and that meal is listed as 640 calories.
I’ve also gotten hello fresh recipes that say they are lower calories that I simply just don’t believe they are as low calorie as they claim.
With meals like pasta or soup they have huge servings and I have leftovers. So if they estimate over 1,000 calories I would estimate I eat 800 of it. But the amount of butter and oil they use has a lot of calories in it.
Also remember they have to count the fat calories in the meat, they can’t account for the excess grease you might be draining from the meat.
And with pasta, we get 3 servings out of all of them.
I posted about it a while ago but regarding Hello Fresh in the UK. Ingredients added in MyFitnessPal were showing much lower numbers than the recipes, because I don’t expect anyone to add the extra 300 kcal worth of oil!
I also find it crazy how big are the differences in the meal sizes between the UK and US. I consider 500-600kcal a decent meal, and 1000kcal sounds massive to me!
But the receipts is for 2 or 4 persons, am I missing something?
I totally agree. I’ve weighed the ingredients when counting macros and calories and it’s ALWAYS under what they say. I can’t figure out how they’re counting, I assume they are averaging and going high.