MFP Food Diary vs. Handwritten Diary

bbutler921

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

melimomTARDIS

depends on where I am. If I am gonna be out of the house all day, I keep a handwritten one, and transfer the info to MFP in the evening. MFP is invaluable for the calorie counting aspect.

lemonsnowdrop

Nope. I use the phone app and, since I take my phone everywhere, it takes literally a few seconds to scan something or enter it in.

jenncornelsen

i did for a long time. but then i was always logging on to figure out the calories in something. this actually seemed quicker now that ive gotten the hang of it. was easier to just 'guess' on paper

Got2beme7

The beauty of electronic is that it automatically gives calories....notebook doesn't. I battled with this decision too and It hought at least for the first few months, I'll do MFP and when I'm more confident, I may switch to a notebook.

cwolfman13

I have a hard time believing writing stuff down in a notebook and calculating the calories and macros by hand is faster than letting a calculator designed to do these calculations do its job. The calculator does all the work for you, all you have to do is find an item in the database.

I don't know...it's pretty damned easy.

isulo_kura

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Does your notebook have a database of 1000s of foods and their nutritional information? If not and you still have to look it up somewhere you may as well look it up on MFP and add it to your diary.

If your happy doing it your way fine but I can't see how you can get the accuracy. Logging on MFP is as hard as you want to make it. I spend around 5-10 minutes at most a day logging

ncboiler89

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Not for me.

NoIdea101NoIdea

I prefer (and use) a notebook too. Firstly, I'm just a bit old fashioned like that, and secondly I find it much easier to log as I go as I have quite a 'hectic lifestyle'.

I have a list of all the foods I commonly eat and their calorie, carb, protein and fat content, which I pretty much update as I go; sometimes it can result in a bit of online research to make sure I get accurate portrayals, but I find it kinda fun and it helps motivate me.

I also keep inspirational pictures, quotes, and exercise routines in there too. It has really helped me to stay on track on many occasions, occasions when there hasn't been a computer to hand.

Sarasmaintaining

When I was in active weight loss phase I did a handwritten one because I was only tracking calories and it was easier to just make note of calories as I ate them (I didn't even write down the food-just the calorie numbers). Now I'm in maintenance and focusing on macros, so I'm here using MFP's food diary to track those

SezxyStef

nope did that back in the 90's with a little book with 1000 food in it...it worked but was a pain in the butt.

I prefer this method...and if I am away from home there's an app for that....;)

Sarasmaintaining

isulo_kura wrote: »

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Does your notebook have a database of 1000s of foods and their nutritional information? If not and you still have to look it up somewhere you may as well look it up on MFP and add it to your diary.

If your happy doing it your way fine but I can't see how you can get the accuracy. Logging on MFP is as hard as you want to make it. I spend around 5-10 minutes at most a day logging

When I did it in a notebook it was very accurate-I just looked at the nutritional labels and then made note of the calories in my nobebook. For things that didn't have a label, like veggies, I used nutritional data to find the info (memorized my regulars pretty quickly though).

RunTimer

nope.
MFP diary
7min..done

livingleanlivingclean

I do both - i make a meal plan for the week on MFP to meet my macros, then it gets written in to a note book. It's easier to refer to, and a good record..... I'm on my 3rd book.

bbutler921

isulo_kura wrote: »

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Does your notebook have a database of 1000s of foods and their nutritional information? If not and you still have to look it up somewhere you may as well look it up on MFP and add it to your diary.

If your happy doing it your way fine but I can't see how you can get the accuracy. Logging on MFP is as hard as you want to make it. I spend around 5-10 minutes at most a day logging

I tend to eat the same things so I usually have the nutrition information. I currently log in a notebook and MFP but I can't have my phone at work so I write it all down and then log it at home, which is why I said it's easier to log in a notebook for me

Maybe I just don't like change haha. I'll keep using MFP and see if I start liking it better.

HereWeGoAgain7

I do both. I keep MFP updated with my phone/work computer, but for some reason writing it down old-school style really helps me stay on target. Plus its easier for me to just hand my notebook to my coach/dietician and say "what did I miss?"

lemurcat12

I've done that before to understand what I was eating, but I didn't bother with the calorie part--it would have been far too much work.

I enjoy putting it in MFP now--easy and weirdly fun.

I keep a journal of sorts and make notes/comments about food stuff and struggles I might have.

shaunte92

Are you using the mobile app? So quick & so easy. You're phone is always at your fingertips.

NoIdea101NoIdea

My phone is also terrible for internet, so can rarely use the app, hence why I tend to use the notebook instead!

aerochic42

I've done the notebook thing kind of listing of food/calories to establish a baseline of what a normal week looked like prior to reducing the food. I found out that the "suggested" MFP was like half of what I normally ate which explained why I couldn't keep it up and was always starving - too big a drop at a time. It also got me in the habit of documenting. I've gotten better about estiguessing sizes and to listening to my body as to how full I really am, so I'm not currently logging or measuring too actively right now.

PeachyCarol

I prelog my day in the morning. I'm not one much for on the go logging.

I know doing it by hand would not be my style. I remember those little calorie count booklets at supermarket checkouts when I was a kid. I think my mother and aunt used one of those and a postage scale back in the day. I'm pretty sure that was the phase that gave birth to the tuna fish mixed with tomato juice nightmare concoction.

segacs

I think the reason calorie counting is so much more popular than it used to be is because, thanks to technology, it's so much more accessible than it used to be.

Programs like Weight Watchers and the like became really popular in the days when calorie counting with any kind of accuracy was a giant hassle. You had to log by hand, and look up foods in a huge book with thousands of foods, and it took forever. Weight Watchers and similar programs aimed to simplify the process, and that was not perfect but it was "good enough" for many people.

But now, with free apps like MFP doing all the hard work for you, there's no real benefit to using those simplified programs versus calorie counting.

I'm old fashioned about a lot of things, too, but tracking calories is so much easier with the app.

Lounmoun

I pre-log my day of food with MFP the night before or in the morning before breakfast. At the end of the day I complete the entry.
I can see how if you do not have access to the internet most of the time then a notebook food diary could be handier but I don't think it is easier.

edellaSut

I use a standard steno notebook, but MFP as well.But this is not really for dietary reasons. I'm diabetic, on a very intensive regime, and therefore have to take lots of notes, numbers and so forth throughout each day of my life. The notes I made about food were useful, but they were jotted down very quickly, and really didn't give me much the guidance for future meals (or much useful overview of medical problems) . Since I've got going with MFP, things have been a breeze! I live in the UK, and shop online from Waitrose/Ocado, so I find that the database already holds most of my food choices. (I'm in the process of transferring over all my custom foods from fitday and I must say that so far I've had to input very very few foods.) A really big advantage of using MFP is that you can transfer daily menus to other dates as long as you know when you put them all in. I keep a record of this, a little index, and when I come across really lovely menus that I want to try again I just go back to '04 – 02-THU' or whatever and copy it to a new date. People seem toImostly eat the same things anyway, so once you have, say, a month or so oif really nice daily menus, the thought processes can ease up a bit! This is especially true if you are on a very strict ketogenic diet, which I am at the moment. It's sometimes very hard to come up with the interesting things on a daily basis so having this sort of backlog of useful menus so easy to hand is very useful. In academic terms, I suppose my scrolled and pitifully messy notebooks on my "primary source" and what I actually printout in Word, with the daily menu on one side and a massive technical diabetes things on the other side are turning out to make a very useful historical report of how it's all going. Generally speaking the advertising for this site says you can lose weight a lot faster if you do it with friends – this is certainly true, but from the diabetic point of view it's also made a world of difference in the way I track and can keep in contro of my now quite normal blood sugar results (between 4.5 and 5.5). I keep a little daily graph of my BG readings as well, and they are starting to go across the grass in a very gentle wavy line rather than in constant zigzags. It's easier to keep track of just how your you are progressing, so I would say use MFP as well. But hey, each to their own way of doing things. I probably wouldn't be doing any of this if I didn't have to!

hsmith0930

I think it depends on what you're using it for. If you are simply trying to be aware of what you're eating without concern of exactly how much and how many calories, paper might be faster. If you are counting calories to lose weight, I think it's much easier to use MFP. I have the app on my phone so I can scan things, but I can usually remember a few numbers enough to make my meal and enter it on my computer too.

I like that MFP has all the data I want in one place. I have all my past journals, notes about my day if I chose to put them in, my weights, etc all together in addition to the community! It's pretty much perfect to me!

hsmith0930

segacs wrote: »

I think the reason calorie counting is so much more popular than it used to be is because, thanks to technology, it's so much more accessible than it used to be.

Programs like Weight Watchers and the like became really popular in the days when calorie counting with any kind of accuracy was a giant hassle. You had to log by hand, and look up foods in a huge book with thousands of foods, and it took forever. Weight Watchers and similar programs aimed to simplify the process, and that was not perfect but it was "good enough" for many people.

But now, with free apps like MFP doing all the hard work for you, there's no real benefit to using those simplified programs versus calorie counting.

I'm old fashioned about a lot of things, too, but tracking calories is so much easier with the app.

I agree with this a LOT! I'm not old by any means, but I know that even when I was first starting to look at weight loss in school I had so few options. I think that easy access to programs such as MFP and Sparkpeople and such will start showing up soon in the statistics of people who successfully keep weight off after losing it!

1shauna1

I have the app on my phone and tablet, and I love it. I'm, I guess you'd say, "older" but nope, this is the easiest way. I have all my recipes and foods I've entered, and everything logs properly, no guessing. So for me, this is the way I keep no track!

HumboldtFred

I print my logs from MFP and put them in a notebook that I keep in my locker at work. It is nice to see those entries in solid state. I also sometimes thumb through my book of wisdom for inspiration and food choices I know I liked.

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Sued0nim

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Yes

I also like using a chisel and slate to write shopping lists

rainbow198

I've been writing my foods down in a notebook for the past 3.5 years. Not so much to save time, or that it's easier - it's just a preference.

I've lost and kept off 80 lbs. and have been maintaining for 2 years.

Works for me.