Introducing ammounts of non-packaged food

Hi guys, I'm new here, I'm having a hard time understanding how to use the app. Lets say I want to introduce how much chicken breast I've eaten. I weighted it (don't know if raw or coocked, but that's a detail), so in the app I choose chicken breast, there's plenty of options, with fixed portions sizes. Can't I just choose by myself how much I've eaten? I'm not looking for a workaround, just for that option, if not, I'd rather switch to another app

Replies

  • Cant_think_of_a_username
    Cant_think_of_a_username Posts: 96 Member
    edited December 2020
    I find it easiest to work with raw weights as water loss from cooking is very variable depending on how long you cook etc. When you select your raw chicken breast you can choose which units to work with. You can adjust the amount when you log it to match what you have eaten.
    So for example you might choose raw chicken breast with 1g as the unit of measure - when you log it you choose how many 1g units you ate and log that.
    Hope this helps
    Cheers
    Steve
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,717 Member
    Hi guys, I'm new here, I'm having a hard time understanding how to use the app. Lets say I want to introduce how much chicken breast I've eaten. I weighted it (don't know if raw or coocked, but that's a detail), so in the app I choose chicken breast, there's plenty of options, with fixed portions sizes. Can't I just choose by myself how much I've eaten? I'm not looking for a workaround, just for that option, if not, I'd rather switch to another app

    Once you spot a food entry you want to use (raw for raw chicken, cooked if cooked), when you select it you should get a spot where you can change the serving size. If you start with an entry that gives the weight in grams or ounces, you can usually use the drop down to select some other weight options.

    If you pick one that has (say) a 100g serving to start, and you have 123g of chicken, you can put the number of servings as 1.23 servings of 100g, and that will give you a calculated number of calories/nutrients. If you pick one in ounces (because that's what you measured, usually the drop down will have a one-ounce value, and you can do a similar thing. If not, and the serving size is (say) 3 oz, you can use your calculator to figure it out. If you have 2.4 ounces of chicken, calculate 2.4 divided by 3.0, which would be 0.8, then put the 0.8 in the number of servings.

    I hope that makes sense.

    This seems a little fiddle-y at first, but once you pick a good entry that works for you, it will stay in your "recent foods" if you use it regularly, and come up first when you do a search.

    There's a bit of a learning process with all this, and it takes some caution because the database is huge (a good thing) but crowd-sourced (entered by regular users, so some entries are more accurate/useful than others). After you get a handle on it, logging is pretty easy. I'd be surprised if I spend as much as 10 minutes total logging each day, at this point, and that's so worth it to me to maintain a healthy weight (after 3 decades previously of obesity!).

    Best wishes for success!
  • rosebarnalice
    rosebarnalice Posts: 3,488 Member
    edited December 2020
    When searching fresh produce and meat, try adding "USDA" to the search ("chicken breast USDA", "romaine lettuce USDA"). Most of the entries are given in 100 grams portions so it's easy to adjust your actual weight as @AnnPT77 outlines. I've found the USDA nutritional database entries to be very reliable and based on good laboratory science
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,717 Member
    When searching fresh produce and meat, try adding "USDA" to the search ("chicken breast USDA", "romaine lettuce USDA"). Most of the entries are given in 100 grams portions so it's easy to adjust your actual weight as @AnnPT77 outlines. I've found the USDA nutritional database entries to be very reliable and based on good laboratory science

    Oddly, the ones that say "USDA" are not the ones that MFP loaded into the database from the USDA. If they say "USDA" they were user entered, and still probably should be checked for accuracy (may have a little better odds).

    The USDA entries that were loaded into MFP at startup can be recognized by their silly bureaucratic names, and the fact that there are different *types* of servings in the serving size drop down (like grams *and* cups *and* inch-sizes). Examples of the kind of titles: "Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, year round average", "Beans, black, mature seeds, cooked, boiled, without salt", "Chicken, broilers or fryers, dark meat, thigh, meat only, raw". Often, the default quantity will be something dumb, like cups on an entry for "Egg, whole, cooked, hard-boiled", but the drop-down has many other options for serving size. (Often, at least one of the serving sizes has a ridiculous obviously broken calorie value, but the others work. It's weird.)