Tracking by Time Blocks

myfoiegraslife

One thing I know for sure, if I track my food religiously, I lose weight, feel better and eat more healthy. I have premium MFP and just noticed I can change my meal names to time blocks. Does anyone track by time blocks rather than meal names? Advantages? Disadvantages?

KrissDotCom

Calorie deficit is how one loses.

Time of day is irrelevant to results unless eating at those specific blocks helps you keep your deficit

DancingMoosie

You can do this without premium, just change the name of the meal to the time frame you eat. But meal timing doesn't really affect weight loss.

hipari

I have them named as time blocks too. I have time block (meal) specific calorie goals to help me evaluate things like ”oh I went 200 over my lunch goal, will need to re-plan a smaller snack or dinner to hit my overall goal”.

Still, Kriss is right, it’s calorie deficit that matters. This is just a tool to help me reach that deficit.

deeshiloh

I have my meals named as time blocks too, and as DancingMoosie said, you can do it without premium - you can name your meals whatever you want in the "diary settings" page. I personally have them named as time blocks just so I can kind of track when in the day I was most hungry and adjust for it (like, was I super snacky in the afternoon or did I wake up hungry or was I most hungry late at night?)

The totality of a given day's intake and output are the most important, but some people's brains like the data better when split into x times of day, rather than x meals and then lumping all snacks in as one block.

EDIT TO ADD: one potential disadvantage to using time blocks is when looking back it might be hard to tell what you ate as a meal and what you ate as a snack, and it's a little more frustrating to use the quick tools to copy over a meal from one day to the next if you're not also planning on eating the same snack, but that's a pretty minor deal to delete the snack food entry/entries after copying the meal over.

Duck_Puddle

When I was in my eating disorder treatment program, I was expected to eat a meal every four hours. So I had my meals as time blocks.

If you’re trying to find out when you may naturally be more hungry so you can begin to adjust your eating for that-time blocks may make sense. Or if you tend to inadvertently skip meals and end up extra hungry and extra snacky as a result-time blocks might help you “remember” to eat.

The “best” meal names are the ones that work for whatever your habits/lifestyle/concerns are.

I have my meals named by function/circumstance at the moment. For example-I am a long distance runner training for a 50k. I take in a fair number of calories (and generally pretty heavy on sugars/simple carbs/sodium/etc) before/during/after my longer runs. I have that segmented as a “meal” so can monitor that (and sort of keep those 100g of sugar separate from what I normally eat).

I also have a “meal” just for coffee. It’s not many calories (I drink it black with artificial sweetener), but with its own category-I can always see how many cups I’ve had each day. I’m trying to keep my caffeine intake in check so this is helpful.

Then there are the technical concerns if you copy from your own or someone else’s diary (where matching meal names and/or Similar contents may make that easier)

Ultimately-whatever works for you is the right way to go.