Calorie confusion!

tamarahope

I’m trying to log this Pret muesli pot for breakfast, but the app gives *such* different calorie counts for the same thing and I’m paralyzed about which to choose. I know dieters tend to underestimate rather than overestimate calorie counts so I don’t want to fall into that trap. How do people cope with these discrepancies in the app?

yirara

If Pret is a food chain and not a supermarket: look up the current calories. Many things in the database could be years old, or from other countries. and assume they gave you a lot more food than one serving.

Retroguy2000

You just have to do your best. Find the best entry. If your item doesn't list calories and macros, check the website for the store, it may be there. And if none of the database entries match that info, then add it yourself to the database and leave it public for others. If you can't find the calories and macros anywhere, use a best guess from another store or item that seems similar. Related to that, I have a private food entry called "Food 1g" which is 100 calories with 1g protein, and similarly for "Food 4g", and I enter "1.5 Food" or whatever if something had 150 calories but it's too much hassle to find a database entry for something I won't use often.

With the above examples in OP, tbh it's mostly noise around 300 calories. You can't assume the stated calories are ever 100% accurate anyway. In the US, the FDA allows for 20% variance between stated nutrition values and what you get, plus there could be serving size differences if it's a restaurant.

AnnPT77

This isn't meant as snotty, but I'd also note that all of those entries that have a weight tend to have different weights as well as different calories. With one exception (the one in ounces), most of them estimate something pretty close to 1.4 calories per gram.

In effect, that puts my opinion pretty close to Retro's: "It's mostly noise around 300 calories".

@tamarahope, I completely get that this is frustrating and confusing. We were all new to this at some point, and most of us wanted to be accurate. A thing that needs to register viscerally is that all of this stuff is estimates: Calorie needs, calories in a food, exercise calories. Even food weights on a home scale are inexact, food labels are inexact, mixed foods (stew, say) have different calories in different servings, one apple is sweeter than the next, and more.

A person could go crazy. But all we need is workable estimates, all the way through, not perfect ones. If it needed to be perfect, no one would succeed, but many people do succeed. You can, too.

With experience, I think one gets a better feel for what's a relevant magnitude of accuracy. In this case, if it was a food I was going to eat semi-regularly, and if the store/restaurant had a web site with nutrition details, I'd find and log an MFP food database entry that matched that (or create my own that matched).

If I couldn't find better info, but ate that thing repeatedly, I'd still look at multiple of those entries and find one with plausible macros (which only matters if you want to track macros semi-accurately, which is your call); I'd log that.

If it was a one time only food for me, I'd just grab an average looking calorie number from the list, maybe high-average if they varied much more widely than that list, and call it good enough. It's the stuff we eat on repeat that's most helpful to get semi-accurate, when possible. If a thing is rare, the impact of error is less important.

Here's a key piece, though: One thing that's IMO very important when we know it's all estimates. I'd recommend that you track your food as accurately as practical (without going crazy obsessive ) for 4-6 weeks, and compare your average weight loss per week to your goal loss rate. (If you have menstrual cycles, compare weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles to estimate average weekly loss.)

Once you have that multi-week experience, you can adjust your calorie goal if necessary to personalize it. (Use the assumption that 500 calories per day is about a pound a week, or 1100 calories per day is about a kilogram a week, and apply arithmetic for partial pounds/kg.)

Not only does that sort of adjust your calorie goal to accommodate your closeness to the average calorie needs that MFP or other calories/fitness trackers estimate, it also adjusts somewhat to account for systematic errors in estimating food/exercise. Most of us are largely creatures of routine: Our eating and exercise vary somewhat, but are patterned. The overs and the unders kind of average out, if we're conscientious about seeking out reasonable estimates (rather than always going for the lowball calorie entry in the food database, for example).

Best wishes!

Hobartlemagne

Pick the higher calorie one and be confident that you've documented the meal without overlooking anything