Help logging food

ALIST2013

Could anyone advise me the best way to log food from a canteen when I don’t know the quantities n weight etc??

KrissFlavored

If you're new here it can be hard to guesstimate premade foods.

After being here for years and logging my own weighed food for so long it does get easier to try and get within the ballpark.

Since I have no idea what you're eating, I cant even offer you a calorie range to aim for.

yirara

Three questions:
Does your canteen have nutritional information for each dish?
Can you serve yourself?
Do you pay per meal or on a monthly base/not at all?

Here's what I did when I worked in the Middle East. The food was mostly Indian/Sri Lankan/Arabic and rather high in fat. Nutritional info was available though a bit questionable. I was paying for the use of the canteen per month and could serve my own food.

Every now and then I'd take plastic cups and put hopefully the same amount of food from a dish into a cup and on my plate. Did that for everything, which was usually a curry and rice, plus a bit of hoummus for example. Eat my dinner, take the cups up to my desk and weigh them. Then bring the food in the cups home for my partner's next day lunch. I'd also bring a cup of cucumber, paprika and cherry tomatoes, and a piece of cheese to snack on for later. I could easily weight those on my desk. Thus this gave me a fairly good estimate on how much I was eating in the canteen. Now the problem is: portion creep is totally real! I'd do this every 2 weeks or so on different food and build up a database of what the canteen is serving. But even if I only took one spoon of something I could be sure that this one spoon got bigger in the course of a few days. Thus I needed to re-check every now and then. I also always tried to take food from the top of the dish, with as little sauce and fat as possible. Well, I did lose the weight I wanted to lose. So I'd say it worked.