How to track efficiently

NanaAsiedu3566

Hello everyone!I

want to restarting tracking my foods. I have had issues in the past as I find the way the app stores food a bit clunky with some of it's use cases which adds friction for me.

For more context check out this previous post I made:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10921807/food-shopping-lists#latest

Problem 1: I want a way to add supermarket packaged food I eat

Partial solution : Scan the packaging and add it to a meal

Problem 2: I find it very weird I have to scan a specific packaging I eat often 10 times to log it 10 times. I have a lot of packaging and it is very tedious to scan the same item repeatedly.

Solution (not in the app): Allow users to scan items in bulk to a saved list that they can use when logging

Can I please get recommendations about ways I can efficiently scan items that I eat repeatedly?
Can the myfitnesspal team pleaseeeeeeee add a way to create food items via barcode. You allow users to create items manually. But you should allow users to create items using a barcode. right now i'm forced to add it to a dairy entry which I do not want to do. I want to scan it once and use it as many times I want in future entries.

Thank you!!

NanaAsiedu3566

future suggestions:
You can even create automatic/manual lists of food for the user
"List of Tesco items"

"List of Sainsburys items"

"Ready Made Meals"

"Fruit"

"high protein food items"

ETC. ETC.

I attempted to use meals and recipes as a list but it didn't work as that is not their intended purpose… This makes logging very awkward for me as I just want to go to my "tesco list" and log items I usually buy from "tesco"

Or I just eat fruit… let me select it from my "fruit list".

It's great you have advanced photo and voice logging but they are advanced features. But I feel a food list is a fundamental feature that should be included in the app. Without it I don't feel very motivated to log items

AnnPT77

There is a food list, kind of. After I log a food once, whether by scanning or typing in, MFP saves it in my recent/frequent foods, and will stay there as long as a log it semi-regularly.

On the next use, even if I had scanned it in, I wouldn't re-scan. Instead, after clicking "Add food", I'd type in a few letters of the name, and the foods in recent/frequent that match those letters will show up first below the search box. Then all I need to do is click the food, and change the number of servings if necessary, to log it.

Obviously, when repeat-eating a food, we're going to have to do something to log it, and it seems like typing in a few letters then clicking on it is about as minimal as it's going to get.

The above description is the phone/tablet app, which I assume is what you're using since you're talking about scanning bar codes. Web browser MFP still has recent/frequent foods, but they work a little differently.

Also, if you want to suggest new features, this isn't the place to do it. The MFP staff doesn't read the whole Community. There's a specific place to put recommended new features or improvement suggestions. That's here:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/categories/feature-suggestions-and-ideas

Speaking as someone who's been logging for almost 10 years - loss then maintenance - I honestly don't like and don't normally use bar code scanning.

Too often, the scanned result doesn't match the package in calories/nutrition (because the bar codes aren't a direct pipeline to manufacturers, just foods some regular user entered with a bar code). Also, having to pick up and put down my phone while cooking - maybe with messy hands I have to wash first - for me isn't an efficient way to go about it. It takes less time to note stuff on a piece of scrap paper and log the whole list at the end.

Some people pre-log meals well in advance, so maybe the scanner works better in those cases, but it would be more time-consuming and annoying for me to use it rather than typing, especially with things I eat often where I type minimal letters.

The photo logging is IMO a joke, something that sounds cool for marketing MFP, but that's way to clunky and inaccurate to use IRL.

NanaAsiedu3566

Thanks for taking the time to respond!
Your assessment is pretty much what I gathered so it's good to know I wasn't going crazy…

Ill request the features again since i've paid for the subscription and i'm seriously scratching my head why I can't easily select and order previously logged items