Tracking Dinner to Lunch

robingmurphy

I've heard of people who track their calories from Dinner through Lunch the next day. This has the psychological advantage that you don't need to worry about whether you've left yourself enough for dinner. How do you track like that using MyFitnessPal though?

RAinWA

You could just rename your meals so that dinner is first, breakfast second and lunch third.

xmarye

RAinWA wrote: »

You could just rename your meals so that dinner is first, breakfast second and lunch third.

That's how I would do it too.

Have you considered planning for your day and pre-logging? That way you ensure you have enough calories for the end of the day. It also takes the guess work out of it by having a plan, you never have to wonder what you will be eating.

I sometimes decide to swap out things if I feel like it or if my plans/hunger change, but it's good to have a base to work off. That's what works for me!

I also look forward to after dinner because I always make sure that I have 100-200cals for a dessert that is also pre-planned.

robingmurphy

Thanks for the suggestions! I do often plan meals, and that works pretty well except when the unexpected happens - sudden invitation to dinner out, or I need to take care of something for the kids and don't have access to planned foods. I notice I overeat often then, and then the calorie goal for the day is shot. It might be easier to think of dinner as the start of the day and then adjust from there. It's easier for me to control what I eat at breakfast and lunch.

cmriverside

Track your weekly calories. I do that, sort of.

I have all my calories eaten, exercise calories and net calories in a spreadsheet that runs for a week at at time. The daily average intake and my weekly over/under are also calculated.

It all works out. I still stick by logging my food in a regular 24 hour, 7 day block on this site, but the numbers get crunched as a total week average.

You could name your meals on the FOOD page with time-slots, so "5AM-9AM," 9AM-Noon," etc., like that.

robingmurphy

I suspect I'd get into trouble tracking weekly because today's Robin is often willing to make a debt that future Robin has to pay, but then when I get to it I don't want to pay it. What that translates into related to diet is that I'm perfectly capable of overeating on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc with the assumption that I'll make up for it Thursday, Friday, Saturday ... but then I get to Thursday, and I just don't want to and fall into the "Well, maybe I can just eat less next week overall to make up for it..."