Help! Noob alert!

Brandon2211

I’m new to this and absolutely find this tracking thing frustrating. There are some things I try to track like New York strip steak that has either no info or is from some where I didn’t get it from. Question one should I only get foods with scannable bar codes? Say I want a orange the bag I baught doesn’t have any nutritional info on it, how do I even track this if I can’t scan it....

LyndaBSS

The database is made up mostly of user entries. There are a ton of errors. I typically check the usda database if I’m eating a food not already in my diary. Then I find an entry similar to that or create my own.

There's no need for barcode scanning.

Luke_rabbit

If I were eating an orange for the first time, I would do the following.

1. Peel the orange and weigh on my kitchen scale in grams the part I was going to eat.
2. Search for an entry in database with "orange, raw, navel" - this syntax usually finds the original USDA database entries.
3. Use the pulldown to select the "100 grams" option.
4. Enter the weight of my orange like this: 1.84 for 184 grams.
5. The first time I use a food, I also use a Google search adding USDA to the search term and verify the calories and nutrients based on 100 grams from the USDA database.

After you have the right one, it will show up in your recent food list, so you never have to repeat these steps for that food.

Once I skipped step 5 for a food (nectarine) and wondered later why a nectarine had so many more calories per gram than a plum. Turned out I had picked an inaccurate entry from MFP.

This sounds like a big job, but after the first couple of weeks it becomes easier both because of your recent food list and experience.

BTW, I often use the bar scanner than just verify that the numbers are correct the first time. They are right more than half of the time, but less than 75%!

Brandon2211

Thanks guys appreciate the info,