How do I use a food scale with MFP?

carld256

I recently decided that I needed to measure food accurately instead of just eyeballing it, so I bought a food scale. I'm not sure how best to use it for entering food into MFP. For example, this morning I had 166g of potatoes fried in about a 1/4 tsp of olive oil, and a 107g apple along with other stuff that's already measured.

What's the best way to enter those amounts into MFP? I ended up finding something close in grams and using the calculator. For the potatoes I added 1.12 servings of "Raw 110 Cal - Potato, White, 165.76 g / 5.3 oz" I know that's not exactly accurate since that counts raw, but it'll be good enough for now, and it was one of the few I could find measured in grams.

For the Apple I added 0.695 of a serving of "Apple - Medium - Granny Smith, 154g" for 107.03g, which is about exactly right.

This works, but I feel like I'm going the long way around to get there. Is there a quicker way to get accurate amounts into MFP?

mcarter99

If I search on "apple" and pick the first result, "apple, raw with skin", there is a dropdown for the unit of measure. Pick different apple entries until you find one with grams in there. This entry doesn't have 1 gram but it has 100 grams. If your apple was 107 grams you could put it in as 1.07 servings of 100 gram apple.

Or you could do it your way. In either case, you're probably counting the calories in the core but that's splitting hairs.

Also, does your food scale have an option to change the unit of measure? If so, and you find ounces more user-friendly, you might switch to that. Grams is nice, though.

carld256

Thanks.

Yes the scale does ounces and grams and will even tell you the calories, but that part is kind of cumbersome. I figured grams would be more accurate than ounces, and most foods list both ounces, or cups, and grams.

I think I might add foods I eat a lot to "My Foods" so they'll be easy to find.

PS: I gnaw my apples down till there's almost no core left. I used to eat the seeds until I found out they have a little bit of cyanide in them.

llkilgore

I'd use "apple, raw with skin" for the apple and "Generic - White Potato, Raw 100 g (Usda Data)" for the potatoes. The math is easier if you can find a database entry that gives the nutritional info per gram or an even 10 or 100 grams. I keep a text file of such entries that the search function doesn't return at the top of the list so that I don't have to search for them again.

carld256

Good idea. I wish there were some way to "favorite" foods to make them easy to find.

Dragonnade

I generally go for, say, 60g of rice, uncooked weight. Standard measurement being 100g. So put in 0.6 of a serving. Often I find there's a 1g 'serving' size so it's really easy to get it accurate.

janemem

I always log the nutritional value of any foods that I buy (before I put them away in the fridge/freezer/larder) under 'My Foods' and when I type the name of the product I put my name first, ie; Jane's Tesco Salad Onion.
That way when I want to log a food item in my diary or when I'm creating a recipe I can find the exact ingredient and I'll know that the nutritional information is 100% correct for me.