When eating out with friends at a place where you can’t track the food on MyFitnessPal

akafful

Ever happen? How does this work?

SuzySunshine99

You basically have two options...

You can find and log a similar dish that is listed for a restaurant that posts their nutritional information. This works best for complex dishes that have many or unknown ingredients.

Or, you can do your best to estimate the ingredients in the dish, and log each ingredient individually. This works best if it's more of a simple dish, like a steak and potato.

Either way, anytime you are not preparing the food yourself, it's going to be an estimate. But, an estimate is better than not logging it at all.

westrich20940

3rd option --- actually don't log it. Unless this is a situation that is happening fairly often, it's gonna be ok if you don't know how many calories you ate one day. It's more important to have consistency over time. I guess it will depend on your and your regular diet as far as how many times per month makes it worth worrying about or not.

So yeah, if you look real quick and it seems there's some options that look good to pick do that. I personally wouldn't go through and do anything individually just because it's kind of tedious.

cwolfman13

My wife and I and our friends rarely eat out at franchise chains, so pretty much that happened anytime we went out. I usually just found something similar in the database from a chain or didn't bother at all and just maybe threw in some quick add calories. Eating out was a pretty rare thing when I was in my weight loss phase, so a one off once in awhile wasn't really a big deal.

Strudders67

I eat out at least once a week and my most frequented restaurant definitely doesn't post calorie info. I go with a best-effort of finding similar entries from other restaurants. They may not have been cooked the same way, may not use the same ratio of ingredients etc, but it's closer and more accurate than not logging anything. I'm now in maintenance and have been for over 18 months, but logging 'something' meant I never derailed my weight-loss progress.

goal06082021

Most of the restaurants I eat at have calorie information on the menu, so if nothing else, I just Quick Add whatever the number is and maybe put something in the notes explaining what I had.

I will also +1 finding something similar from a chain or guesstimating as best you can at each component of a dish. I usually err on the side of overestimating.

mjglantz

I usually do what @SuzySunshine99 does and estimate as close as possible. The other thing I'll do is just estimate the calories and do a quick add. I won't get the nutrient info, but when I look back at the week I can see the calorie trend.