How to log vacation foods?

cnnguyen1995
cnnguyen1995 Posts: 2 Member
in MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions
Went to Maryland to stay with our daughter. Drove to Pennsylvania, Lancaster area and ate at shady maple smorgasbord. Was not able to log food.

Best Answer

  • Sinisterbarbie1
    Sinisterbarbie1 Posts: 711 Member
    Answer ✓
    I would suggest looking up commercial or large chain restaurant versions of the foods you ate and doing your best to guess at portion sizes and guessing high assuming that your eye is not as accurate as a scale. I often find that it is not as bad as I think it will be even with this sort of high guesstimation. If you don’t try to guess at all you might let missing logging for a couple of days of vacation turn into a week, a month, or total abandonment of logging and measuring because it is easy to get out of the habit.

    There is a lively debate on here about “cheat” meals and days eating wise. I don’t subscribe to that idea. I eat what I plan to eat and I don’t feel bad about eating over calories on occasion. I never took an extreme approach to calorie cutting and haven’t gone back to any real higher calorie eating on a regular basis now that I have lost significant weight. For me if I felt I needed a cheat meal that would signal that I was trying to eat in an overly restrictive way. But that doesn’t sound like what you are saying or doing.

Answers

  • glassyo
    glassyo Posts: 7,736 Member
    You couldn't log it because it's not in the database?

    You could find comparable foods and log those. They won't be exact but nothing really ever is and at least something is better than nothing.

    Unless it's a cheat meal/day. :)
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,166 Member
    It's fine to guess or estimate sometimes. As long as it's fairly rare that you need to make a truly wild guess, even being off by quite a lot won't have major impact on your overall weight loss trend. (That said, do try to be realistic in your estimates, without obsessing about it.)

    Sometimes, if it would be polite in the situation, I'll use my phone to snap a picture of my plate (no flash!), so I can use that to estimate later. It helps to put a fork or some other standard-sized thing on the plate for scale, to help with estimating portion sizes later.

    Just make your best guess, log it, then go on with life. It'll be fine.

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