Disappointed in MFP

DeniseLegeard

Hi all. I recently made the switch after 10 years from fitbit to a garmin device. Garmin requires us to use MFP to log food etc. Unfortunately I find that food logging etc on fitbit was a million times better than this. I could scan barcodes, enter recipes etc. MFP doesn't allow this unless you pay over $100 a year. Very frustrating. I have actually gone back to using fitbit app for my food, but it does not link to Garmin. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can manage my food better with MFP?

Lietchi

You don't need premium to create recipes, as far as I know. I do prefer the meals functionality though personally, easier to use. And the barcode scanner seems fun, but when you do a manual search you get multiple results and you can choose the best/ most correct one, while the barcode scanner only gives a single result that could be entirely wrong.

I've never logged food on Fitbit so I can't compare. But I've been logging food with the free version of MFP for more than 5 years now - it does the job for me.

If you give more detailed info on what isn't working for you, we may be able to help.

AnnPT77

If you need the scanner, that's going to be the hundred bucks. I'm like Lietchi, I find the scanner more misleading than helpful. I lost weight fine with free MFP, didn't get premium until a fair way into maintenance, couple years, maybe - don't remember.

Maybe MFP doesn't suit you. Very possible.

Here's a thing, though: I'll beg your indulgence for what seems like a digression, but isn't.

I spent decades in IT systems development. Every single time, when we'd put in a very new system, people felt the new system was bad, way worse than what preceded it. However, pretty much every single time, a few weeks to a small number of months down the road, when they'd been using the new system for a while, they decided it was better than the old one - usually much better.

What's behind that? Well, it wasn't that the new system had changed in that short time.

When we've used a thing for a while, we feel competent and confident. We can do what we need to do well, with that tool. It's quick, easy, predictable. Then - poof - somebody changes everything, and we're a total newbie again, feeling confused, not capable, and having to take lots more time to figure out how to do our thing in this new way.

That's the learning curve, in real life. Overnight, we go from personally effective to floundering. No one likes that.

Am I saying MFP is better than Fitbit? No. I don't know. My best guess is that it's probably worse in some ways, better in others. But I'd flat out guarantee that pretty much anyone forced to switch - in either direction - will hate the new one for a while.

The realistic choices are to accept the lack of integration between MFP and Garmin, and stick with Fitbit logging for food . . . or switch to MFP and accept that it will be very different, that it will take some time to figure out how to use it effectively and efficiently, and that even in the long run there will probably be some things that were better with Fitbit logging. (But there may also be some things that are better with MFP.) That's true whether you stick with free MFP in the latter case, or pay for premium.

As far as tips to manage your logging better on MFP, I agree with Lietchi: That's hard to answer unless we have a better idea where the speed bumps are for you.

For sure, you can enter recipes in free MFP or import recipes from the web. That will work differently, too, but I'm thinking you probably haven't explored that since you seem to think the feature isn't even available. If you try it, and see issues, be specific and I'll bet we can help.

As generic tips, my advice would be to learn to use Meals, learn to use Recipes, take care when first logging foods to pick good, accurate entries from the mostly crowd-sourced food database so that you get good data into your recent/frequent foods - those will then come up first when adding foods to the diary thereafter, as long as you continue eating the thing semi-frequently. If you don't like any of the entries there, you can put things in My Foods instead, where they'll stay long term.

The biggest tip, though, would go back to where I started: Recognize that if you switch tools, things will be uncomfortable, feel time-consuming during the learning phase. That doesn't last forever.