Open diary- just want to make sure I'm on the right track! Feedback appreciated!

catherinecollins1420
catherinecollins1420 Posts: 6 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I am fairly new to MFP and I have just completed my 7th day of logging (yay!) I have an open diary and would appreciate some feedback about what I'm eating! I'm not really sure what my macros should be or if I'm getting enough nutrients or If I'm eating the right amount and the right variety of things, etc- so any tips/ suggestions/ constructive criticisms would be awesome! Feel free to be brutally honest. Thanks!!!

Replies

  • CoffeeNCardio
    CoffeeNCardio Posts: 1,847 Member
    I'm reading now:) hang tight
  • CoffeeNCardio
    CoffeeNCardio Posts: 1,847 Member
    oops, your diary isn't open to the public. It's only set to be viewable by your friends. You can change this by going to settings-diary, and pulling the little drop down til it says "public" instead of "friends only"
  • catherinecollins1420
    catherinecollins1420 Posts: 6 Member
    CoffeeNCardio wrote: »
    oops, your diary isn't open to the public. It's only set to be viewable by your friends. You can change this by going to settings-diary, and pulling the little drop down til it says "public" instead of "friends only"

    Oops! Thanks- it should be open now:)
  • knelson095
    knelson095 Posts: 254 Member
    Your stats might be helpful as well. What are your goals?
  • CoffeeNCardio
    CoffeeNCardio Posts: 1,847 Member
    Okay, my first impression is that you are very good at spreading your calories throughout the day. This is a great habit to keep up because you're gonna want the energy to remain steady, and spending all your calories in one place is a tough day to get through, so great job there!

    I do see a lot of sort of off-looking entries though, not like you did them wrong, but that they may be user-entered. Specifically I'm looking at the couple with the smiley faces as well as the ones for the energy balls (kale and stuff yeah?) If those were entered by YOU after you had weighed and "Create A Recipe" buttoned, then it's all good, is that the case? Or are these things you found in the database that were created by someone else and did not have a green check mark next to them?
  • seska422
    seska422 Posts: 3,217 Member
    Are you using a food scale for some solids but not for others? Some of your gram weights are really specific so I'm thinking you have a scale?

    Weight is a much more accurate way to measure solids than volume. The big change I'd make at this point is to start weighing all your solids in grams.
  • knelson095
    knelson095 Posts: 254 Member
    CoffeeNCardio wrote: »
    Okay, my first impression is that you are very good at spreading your calories throughout the day. This is a great habit to keep up because you're gonna want the energy to remain steady, and spending all your calories in one place is a tough day to get through, so great job there!

    I do see a lot of sort of off-looking entries though, not like you did them wrong, but that they may be user-entered. Specifically I'm looking at the couple with the smiley faces as well as the ones for the energy balls (kale and stuff yeah?) If those were entered by YOU after you had weighed and "Create A Recipe" buttoned, then it's all good, is that the case? Or are these things you found in the database that were created by someone else and did not have a green check mark next to them?

    ^^
    Also, do you have a food scale? Some entries are entered as of they were weighed and some are just measured. If you have one you should weigh all solids in grams and measure liquids with cups and spoons.
  • CoffeeNCardio
    CoffeeNCardio Posts: 1,847 Member
    edited November 2015
    Also, what are your settings? Set to lose .5/1/1.5/2 lbs per week? And do you have specific macro goals for fitness or health reasons? Cause if you don't, you're meeting them fine based on the generalized settings in MFP.

    ETA: Whoops, I realize you beat me to it @knelson095
  • CoffeeNCardio
    CoffeeNCardio Posts: 1,847 Member
    seska422 wrote: »
    Are you using a food scale for some solids but not for others? Some of your gram weights are really specific so I'm thinking you have a scale?

    Weight is a much more accurate way to measure solids than volume. The big change I'd make at this point is to start weighing all your solids in grams.

    This. I see a lot of broccoli entries in there in cups rather than in grams, and I am CERTAIN those are user entries. Anything you find in the database without a green check mark is questionable at best, damaging to your efforts at worst. I would suggest checking out the below site for any entry you cannot find in the database WITH a green checkmark (indicating it has been verified as "true"). Like the Broccoli you had, having JUST made broccoli for dinner tonight myself, I know for a fact that one is both incorrect and user entered.

    http://nutritiondata.self.com/

    This is also a great resource if you're going to weigh things after cooking them instead of raw. Nutritional data for cooked foods is very hard to find in the MFP database, so what you can do is plug it in at the link, as "Broccoli, cooked, steamed/boiled" and it pulls up "Broccoli, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt". THEN you plug the name that came up from the link into MFP, and it almost always pulls up an entry with a green check mark, which you can trust. Those green mark ones are also handy in that you can change the serving size to most anything and weight however you please:)
  • 2hveit
    2hveit Posts: 1 Member
    this was very informative,I thought it was something like that.....Thank You
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,162 Member
    This is a really old thread (2015!). It has some inaccurate information, as many old threads do.

    The green check-marked entries are not necessarily accurate: Most were user-entered, and the check just means several people agreed that they were correct. (I think it's 5.) Several people may be wrong, or careless, or only care about calories, or be using the product in a different country where the formulation is different or label regulations differ, or it may be an old entry for a product that's been reformulated . . . .

    Also, some of the most accurate entries - ones loaded from the USDA database when MFP started up - have a default quantity in cups, even for things that are stupid to measure in cups, like watermelon or hardboiled eggs. When you look in the serving drop-down for those, there are weights and volumes options that make more sense, and they tend to be accurate. Those entries do often have names only a bureaucrat could love, usually with adjectives in a particular order, like "Beans, black, mature seeds, cooked, boiled, with salt". Regular MFP users don't usually enter foods with names like that. (USDA entries from that initial MFP start-up do not say "USDA" in the title.)

    Verify entries before using them, for best accuracy. USDA FoodData Central is a good resource, in the US.

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

    There, the entries in the SR Legacy category often correlate by name with what was initially loaded into MFP, before the database was populated with more user-entered data.

    The Self nutrition database isn't at that link any longer, and I'm not sure whether it even exists anymore.

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