Calorie counting is making me insane.

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  • PikaKnight
    PikaKnight Posts: 34,971 Member
    extremely time consuming? not really

    Certainly far less time consuming than keeping up with the MFP forums.

    plus if she has time to cook full meals she has time to click some keys on the computer

    Good point. I do a lot of my preliminary meal logging while the food is cooking...and then make an adjustment later for the amount I actually ate. A few minutes, tops...and without obsessing over it. It's only time-consuming/onerous if you make it that way.

    And using the phone app makes it more convenient to adjust as you cook as well. It really is not that time consuming.
  • jenniferreed02
    jenniferreed02 Posts: 7
    How you feel is more important than the number on the scale. It sounds like you know this but have gotten into a toxic mind loop of having to control every bit of food/weight.

    I would throw away your scale. Seriously. Get rid of it and don't weigh yourself. Take measurements a few times a month, track food the best you can, and that will have to be good enough. After a few months if you do put on weight (not water weight - more than 5 lbs) then reconsider. It sounds like you need a break though.

    As far as it being frustrating if your home cooked meals are not exact - I would work on getting an approximate number for the meals you cook most frequently and saving those meals in MFP. For us, we really pretty much rotate between about 20 dishes in our home. The occasional odd ball dish is not going to totally ruin your diet anyways. It is all about estimation and being aware. After counting/logging for a while you should have a good idea of how much you need to eat and not have to rely so much on the entries.
  • jenniferreed02
    jenniferreed02 Posts: 7
    Your daily weight should not affect your mood to that extent. Especially if you are fluctuating a few pounds - this is totally normal and can be a number of things to add or subtract a lb any given day.

    If you can't break this cycle on your own and get to feeling better about yourself, you need to see a specialist before it gets out of hand. A nutritionist would be my first stop and to get referred to a therapist who deals with eating disorders.
  • csuhar
    csuhar Posts: 779 Member
    Creating a general but not rigid structure via some sort of meal planning framework may be one option, and there's other methods you could employ as well.


    Something I used to do was plan my menu using cookbooks or magazines that had the nutrition information per serving included with the recipe.

    Then, all I did was make sure I was following the recipe as closely as I could to make sure I was in the same ballpark as the original recipe the data came from. But I wouldn't sweat every little detail. If I needed a can of tomatos and the recipe used Del Monte but all I could find were Contadina brand, I didn't care. If it called for a 10 oz can of chicken and all the store had were 12 ouncers, I didn't worry. As long as I was close to what the recipe called for, that was good enough.

    The second step was to simply make sure the portion I ate was the right size, such as 1/4 of a 4-portion recipe.

    The end result is that I was still generally counting calories and even macros, but I wasn't stressed with putting in every little detail each and every day. Even now that I'm on MFP, I'll often just input a recipe as a food and use the nutrition information from the cookbook so that I'm not havign to go through the database and do calculations just to say I had 1/5 of an 8 oz can of X-brand sliced mushrooms.

    Especially if you have recipes you use over and over but can't always guarantee that the ingredients are EXACTLY the same each time, this can be a useful way to keep an eye on things without going nuts.

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