Logging Food

mugginskate

I find logging food to be my most obnoxious struggle. The truth is, I know I lose weight when I log my food, but I cannot get into the habit of doing it. I'm not far off my goal weight, I need to really commit to logging somehow. Any suggestions?

Dogmom1978

Just do it.

Not trying to be harsh about it, but you just need to make it a habit. It isn’t hard and it doesn’t take long. When I first started, I found it annoying, but after a few weeks, it became second nature.

I find cleaning my house to be super unpleasant. I don’t like to pay bills. The list could go on and on. I do those things anyway because there are benefits to doing them. As adults, we do plenty of irritating things, so not sure why THIS irritating thing (for you) would be the breaking point. It literally takes a few seconds or a couple minutes if you pre log the entire day. 🤷🏻‍♀️

lemurcat2

What do you find difficult about it? Knowing that would help us know what to suggest.

yirara

Are there things you eat commonly? doesn't matter if it's a raw product or something ready-made. When you use the app and start typing in the ingredient then the recently used ones will show up first. Also, it's really easy and quick to log while cooking. After a while you might have a good idea of how much you can eat. For me this usually looks like

Today I cooked a pork steak with (don't judge me) precooked potatoes, mixed tinned veggies and an instant pepper sauce. Ok. When I take everything out of the fridge
* I trim the bone off the meat and weigh it, log. Put aside
* scan drained veggies. I know I might be off there a bit, but I just go with what's on the packaging as the degree of draining makes this unreliable anyway.
* Scan potatoes and quickly check for right database entry.
* Scan sauce package, decide half a pack will do for me. Log 27gr.
* Pan on hob. Put bottle of oil on scale. Switch scale on. Pour oil into pan. Weigh bottle again. Log in grams.
* Quick check on how much potato I can add to my meal to stay within calories. Ah, 200gr. Perfect.
* Put meat and 200gr of potatoes into pan. Pan fry.
* Start making sauce to instruction and weighing out 27gr of powder (yes, I know...)
* Put veggies into bowl and into microwave (yeah.. really)
* Eat.

Overall the weighing has taken up less than 1 minute of extra time. Yes, I did weight a bit more, but that was done during idle time when cooking. No problem. Not tedious at all.

mugginskate

Thanks for the suggestions. I do think it's just a "get in the habit" issue. I find it a tedious task and wrongfully think I can just estimate in my head. Then if there are days that I know I'm going overboard, I really don't want to log. And boom, I'm out of the habit. I have my husband helping to keep me accountable this week, so that helps.

lemurcat2

Once you do it for a week or two, you will likely find that entries you tend to use are in the recents, which makes it a lot easier, too.