Eating out and home baked goods

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RandilovestoRun
RandilovestoRun Posts: 26 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hi there! Still fairly new to MFP... I ate out yesterday at a little Mexican joint and had a hard time logging what I ate. For one I didn't really like what I had so I only at a quarter of it and then ate a little bit of my husbands and a bite of the kids lol. This restaurant is not available in the MFP database so what do you all do when trying to log things like this.
Also I just made some banana bread, pretty simple recipe but I don't really know how to log that if I decide to have some.
Any tips would be appreciated!!

Replies

  • Canuckgirl77
    Canuckgirl77 Posts: 123 Member
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    If I go to a restaurant that doesn't have nutritional info, I just find a similar one and use the closest thing I can find. I always over-estimate to be safe, so if I eat 1/4 of a burrito somewhere then I find info from another place and estimate that I ate 1/2. Other people may do something differently.

    As for baking at home, I measure and weigh everything then plug it into the recipe builder to figure out the calories per slice.
  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    edited July 2016
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    Under the Food tab there is a Recipe section. This allows you to enter your recipes & save them. You can start by importing a basic recipe (kinda glitchy) and then tweaking it. I like to use AllRecipes. Then decide on a number of servings & log it that way.

    Restaurant food is often something you just need to make your best educated guess on. Find something similar (Chi-Chi's or whatever).
  • RandilovestoRun
    RandilovestoRun Posts: 26 Member
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    Awesome! I didn't know there was the ability to build a recipe in the app.
  • dahliagrower11
    dahliagrower11 Posts: 39 Member
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    For eating at a restaurant where the info isn't available I would pull up the food item - and glance at a couple of similar items .... make sure to look at the nutrition info to see if they logged something other than just the calories as much of the data isn't accurate. When you eat at a restaurant you will find that the sodium content is usually very high. They have usually calculated it assuming you eat all the dressing/sauce etc ... and that's where the huge amount of sodium comes from. If the item has nutrients entered - protein, sodium, sugar, carb, fats .... then it is a better choice than one that just has the calories entered.

    With the baked goods - just enter banana bread into the food data and there will be loads of options. Again - if you go with one that says "homemade" make sure that the nutrients have been entered. There will be at least one that has. The data between various homemade banana breads will not be that different - however the weights might be. Weigh a piece of your homemade one to see what the actual serving size weighs and then use a similar one. You can create the recipe yourself - the difficulty then is the serving size.

  • MelaniaTrump
    MelaniaTrump Posts: 2,694 Member
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    After hitting the recipe tab, consider looking to the right and clicking on OLD RECIPE CALCULATOR (you might have to scroll down a bit). It is a billion times easier to use and just as accurate. (opinion).

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