Does anyone just eat and estimate the calories?

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  • netitheyeti
    netitheyeti Posts: 539 Member
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    only in restaurants or if I'm visiting someone for a meal, or if it's something like lettuce, I've also stopped weighing packaged food if I'd previously weighed it a few times and it was within a few g of what it was supposed to weigh
  • hipari
    hipari Posts: 1,367 Member
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    During non-quarantine times I eat out probably 6 times a week, so learning to make estimations is a big part of the game for me. Even at home, I only weigh very calorie-dense foods like nuts, and occasionally I make some ”check-up” weigh-ins for frequently eaten foods. On top of that, I have measured things like the volume of my favorite mug, so I know my morning orange juice is actually 2,2 deciliters instead of 2, that 10% difference every single morning would add up.

    At home I usually estimate based on things like ”my husband and I eat three dinners from one bag of this pasta, so it’s 1/6 of the full bag for one meal”, so I base things on package size. I know I’ll probably have to move to tighter logging when there’s less to lose, but so far things have been working like this.
  • brittanystebbins95
    brittanystebbins95 Posts: 567 Member
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    I estimated for a long time and I lost nearly all of my weight doing that. When it came time to maintain, I found I was still losing weight and my hair even started falling out, I had zero energy, etc.
    I started measuring and low and behold, I was overestimating. By a lot. I was way under eating and didn't even realize it.
    Now I measure meats with a food scale. Veggies and fruits I usually just estimate still. Everything else is a measuring cup. There are always gonna be people who are super religious about their tracking and will advocate that weighing everything is the only way to do it. It's definitely more accurate, but you have to find that balance that works best for you.
  • emalethmoon
    emalethmoon Posts: 178 Member
    edited May 2020
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    5 years ago I lost 90lbs in a year by weighing, measuring and counting everything. I thought "hey, I'm pretty good at this, I can just estimate from now on!" Yeah, so I gained 50 lbs back and now have to work that much harder to get back to where I was, never mind getting to my goal! So please don't do it, just stick with the plan and enter your foods. It takes time, but it's worth it!

    I just started to get back on measuring/weighting/entering 2 months ago and I'm down from 232 to 215.
  • Ostrich218
    Ostrich218 Posts: 14 Member
    edited May 2020
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    emalethmoon wrote: »
    5 years ago I lost 90lbs in a year by weighing, measuring and counting everything. I thought "hey, I'm pretty good at this, I can just estimate from now on!" Yeah, so I gained 50 lbs back and now have to work that much harder to get back to where I was, never mind getting to my goal! So please don't do it, just stick with the plan and enter your foods. It takes time, but it's worth it!

    I just started to get back on measuring/weighting/entering 2 months ago and I'm down from 232 to 215.


    This is my experience too, I maintained for a few years and then lack of weighing and logging slipped in and I’ve put back on half my loss. It’s frustrating to move back from my level of smugness
  • dhiammarath
    dhiammarath Posts: 834 Member
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    If I go out, I estimate. But I estimate based on known quantities. Ie, if I have a pastry at a no-name local bakery, I'll correlate it roughly to a similar pastry at Panera Bread. It might be more, it might be less, but it'll be roughly equivalent.

    I use my food scale on food I know I could overeat (Tostadas lime chips, yum yum, or granola; interestingly, I found that I always charge a full serving of peanut butter, but turns out I only use about half that naturally), but I don't live and die by the food scale either. Some weeks I go down, some weeks I go up, but overall, I'm down 100lbs. If I notice an upward trend, I tighten up my logging, but in general, I figure that I will be about +/-20% off any given week. I could be "done" by now if I were less lazy, but here I am. I am not going to change me, so I've found a way to make me work for me!

    I don't particularly want to log the rest of my life (I have zero emotional attachment to logging, I am just that lazy XD), but I don't want the weight to come back even more than I don't want to log. So when I'm "done"? Who knows. I have a tendency to either undereat (anxiety/emotions steal appetite) or overeat (um, chips, yum?!) my calorie targets so... who knows. I might be "roughly" logging the rest of my life, but eh.

    Find what works for you and gives you the results you want!

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