when unsure of calorie amount?

spammy4145

So today I went to lunch with friends and we had mexican. I had the chicken taco salad (shredded chicken, cheese,lettuce,tomatoes and a small amount of sour cream) I also had some of the chips but I have no idea the caloric amount. How do you guys usually handle this situation when logging in diary?

bonjovi27

When I'm completely lost for calories/amounts, I try to find something similar to it in the MFP database. Hope this helps!

cmriverside

Yeah, either do like bonjovi suggests, or just input the ingredients one by one.

randaswilson

have a short panic attack. it kills me not knowing calories

rockerbabyy

for chips at a mexican place i usually just log tostitos restaurant style
if the restaurant isnt in the database, i look for a similar one.. (like, azteca or ixtapa instead of a local place)

kms1320

Ball park it with similar foods. 50-100 calories either way won't kill you if you still finish at or near your goal. It's just 1 meal.

TravelDog14

I Googled "nutritional information for tortilla chips" and here's what comes up.
For the above example I get 1 ounce = 138 calories on one website and 137 calories = 1 ounce so I can feel pretty confident that it's close. Then you need to be honest about how many you ate when entering your calories in MFP.

Then I Googled "nutritional information for chicken taco salad" and got 400 calories at one site and 900 calories for another, and 1300 at another site. If you ate the fried taco shell it came in then that's easily 250+ calories right there. But if you ate a small salad, didn't pile on the sour cream and guacamole, focused on eating the lettuce and tomatoes, then it might just be at the 400 calories end of the scale but I doubt it.

I will ALWAYS overestimate my calories when in doubt, and sometimes do the calories by entering each individual ingredient. It is eye-opening if nothing else.

MorgueBabe

estimate.

One meal ins't going to kill you.