Meal scan

sqannie68

Hey all! I’ve used MFP for a few years at least. I’m curious about meal scanning. If you use it, do you feel it’s accurate? Pros? Cons?

I just turned 67 and have about 50-60 pounds to lose. I have Hashimoto’s disease and am prediabetic. I’m pretty active and am determined to get fit and improve my health.

AnnPT77

Hello, and welcome! (Also: What an adorable puppy!)

As background, I'm 69F, joined MFP somewhat over 10 years ago. I'm also severely hypothyroid (though not Hashi's), medicated for it; and I'd also been very active for around a dozen years at constant weight before joining. MFP helped me lose about 50 pounds, and stay at a healthy weight for the 9+ years since . . . after about 30 pre-loss years of overweight/obesity.

Obviously, I think this can work, if the methods suit a person, and they commit to do it. (In fact, I think that if a hedonistic aging-hippie flake like me can do it, a woman with a very limited budget of willpower, discipline or motivation . . . then I'd bet any more-sensible grown-up can do it, too.)

I've experimented with the meal scanner, assuming we're talking about the thing where the user takes a photo of their meal. It didn't become available until I was already very well versed in using MFP, which probably biases me. I also eat . . . unusual things . . . which probably makes it less useful for me than for some others. (As an example, I've been vegetarian for 51+ years, and that's not the only way my eating routine differs from average American eating.)

As you're gathering, I was underwhelmed by the feature. I think it's appealing to folks from the standpoint of marketing the app, but I didn't find that it reduced the time to log a meal at all . . . maybe the reverse.

You take a photo, then it gives you a selection of things that food might be. In my test case, pretty much the whole list was wrong guesses. It took more time to log it that way than to type in things that were in the meal, but like I said, I'm maybe biased in the above-mentioned ways. I honestly don't know how it's going to accurately guess certain things that can significantly increase calories in a meal, like how much oil/butter was used, how much cheese there is, whether the dollop of white stuff is calorie-dense sour cream or mayo vs. nonfat plain Greek yogurt.

I don't use recipe-type entries from the food database for that reason, either - talking about other people's entries like "cheese lasagna", "fried egg", "potato salad" . . . who knows what was in their recipe. I input what matches my food label, or input my own recipe, for better accuracy.

If you have MFP premium already, try the scanner. See what you think. Obviously, I'm not a fan.

I'll add this: When new to this, logging food can seem difficult or burdensome and time-consuming. There's a learning curve. Knowing how to use certain features like Recipes and Meals effectively and efficiently takes time. Making sure individual foods logged are accurate takes time, until there are accurate versions of the things we commonly eat built up in our recent/frequent food lists so that they appear first when we search to put a food in our diary.

At this point, it's a rare day that logging my food takes more than 10 minutes, and it's frequently much less. It's easy, quick, routine. For me, that's a small time investment to pay for staying at a healthy weight with good blood test results, good blood pressure, less joint pain, and generally better overall quality of life than I had when I was class 1 obese. It did take some effort and consistency to reach the current state, though - maybe a month or two at first until it started seeming easy and automatic? I can't really remember, honestly, but not super long.

I also don't obsess about the occasional meal I eat in a restaurant or at someone's home. I just make my best guess, aiming maybe a little high on the calorie estimate, and go on with life. One day now and then is a drop in the ocean. The routine things I do day-in and day-out are the ocean. If those are reasonably accurate, the big picture ends up just fine.

I'm wishing you success here: IME, the quality of life improvement is more than worth the effort it takes to accomplish weight loss.