Best Way to Log Dinner?

I usually create my own recipe by entering each individual ingredient and then log the portion of the whole meal that I ate. It is a little time consuming at first, but you can save the recipe so if your hubby makes the same things again it will make logging so much easier.

My hubby is stay at home too but I live only 15 minutes cycle ride away from work (we do have a car but are consciously trying to use it less).

Fortunately, Hubby has also been losing weight too and is only too keen to help and support me in my battle with the bulge. Over the last 9 months, we have gone through all sorts of meals that we regularly have and worked out how to make them more calorie conscious, then logged them either as recipes or saved them as meals. This means we now have quite a repertoire of saved meals which we can call on when we can't think what to eat.

Yes, it DOES take time and some determination to build this information up but believe me, it is worth it!

Hubby and I now sit down, usually on a Sunday evening, with a copy of the week's diary in front of us (we use a GMail electronic diary) and we roughly plan out what we are going to eat over the coming week, bearing in mind things that have to be done or places that we are each going. This "plan" is not set in stone and we might swap one night's meal for another but always roughly within a certain calorie limit, so that we have spare to "spend" if we want.

Hubby is in the enviable position of having lost his weight and is now struggling to eat enough to keep his weight UP (lucky man!) but if he wants more to eat, then he does his in the daytime whilst I am out at work, so I don't have to watch him eating things like jam sponge pudding and custard or a bar of chocolate.

Obviously I don't know if your hubby would agree to do any of this but it is worth a try. We have found that if we do this weekly planning, we can hone down our shopping list to those things that we actually need to cook from scratch and we now rarely buy anything processed. Good for the household budget too!

As I said, it takes a bit of determination but it is worth it in the end.

I live at home and have the same problem sometimes, Although I do make my own meals 90% of the time when I eat what my Mom/Dad's cooked I usually just ask them to write up a little list of all the ingredients and then I go to the 'create a recipe' option on here total everything up and portion it out depending on how much I'm having. I've also put in a few of the things my boyfriend usually makes for me when I'm staying over at his place so I don't have to worry about overloading on junk (lets just say he doesn't share my desire to be healthy lol).

I would just ask him how it's made and what's in it, and log according to how much of the total you ate.

I understand that your husband might not totally be on the train of cooking meals that totally fit a "losing weight" lifestyle, and that you can't ask him to totally change that or become a short order cook. But the very bare minimum of being supportive, in my mind, would be to at least tell you what to log. Even better would be if he'd be willing to meal plan - even the night before, so that you can pre-log dinner and then fit the rest of your day around that to make sure you don't go over if he makes something that's particularly high calorie. And I like the idea of you using the recipe section here to save yourself a bit of time and effort in logging your meals - even if he doesn't use a cookbook or something, if there's certain meals he makes often then at least it's right there for you.

It also might be helpful to have some extra veggies or salad greens on hand to fill out a meal, that's what I do - I do about half of the cooking myself, but neither my husband nor my 2 too-skinny kids need to eat steamed veggies and chicken breasts every night, so if we're having something a little more high calorie as a main course I just take a small portion and then fill up my plate with salad or another veggie in addition to whatever we make, and usually skip the starch side dish (potatoes or whatever) if there is one. For example, tonight we're having sloppy joes, oven fries, and broccoli. I'll skip the bun and just eat a portion of meat with a fork, and instead of oven fries I'll have asparagus in addition to my broccoli. It's super quick to steam veggies in the microwave (aka death box)!

This is my hard meal too. It sets off my OCD a bit. I try to err on the side of caution; ie. eating too few calories rather than too many, and I usually end up choosing what I think is closest from the database.

Have him leave any containers out that you could scan the barcode/enter the exact brand if he uses anything packaged?

I usually create my own recipe by entering each individual ingredient and then log the portion of the whole meal that I ate. It is a little time consuming at first, but you can save the recipe so if your hubby makes the same things again it will make logging so much easier.

This is what I do. Easy to do when you are the one cooking. For someone else to cook I would just make a good guess. Maybe ask him to leave out the packaging for you to scan once you get home?