Am I *too* detailed? (sorta long post, sorry)

Let me start by saying that I use MFP almost exclusively on my phone, 99.5% of everything I’ve ever done or logged with MFP is via my phone. (until two days ago when I discovered the message boards. lol)

With that said, after reading these boards for these few days I’m starting to feel a bit OCD/obsessive about my logging. There hasn’t been a bite I’ve taken that I haven’t logged in some way or another with the exception of five days on vacation in Mexico last April. Everything from a piece of gum to the spices in every recipe I make is looked up, measured and entered. I only eat something if I know the calories before it goes in my mouth. At parties I’m constantly checking with people to find out the brand names of the foods they’ve bought so I can get as exact as possible on my counts each day and I look everything up before munching it down. If something was homemade and they couldn’t provide me info, I didn’t eat it. I’ve even been known to check the brands of things in my parents fridge when I am entering recipes because I know my mom shops differently than I do.

Actually, from March until about July of last year (save for Mexico), I didn’t eat anything that I didn’t have exact nutritionals on because I wanted everything to be exact. I wouldn’t go to a restaurant unless I could find the nutritional data directly from them or their site and every recipe was calculated out before I would even start making it, at which time everything is precisely measured. It wasn’t until a vacation in July to San Diego with friends that I even went above my base 1200 calories a day for the first time (I wasn’t working out at that time). I didn't have a single binge/cheat day (again, other than Mexico) at all until July. And even in San Diego, there were a few things that I couldn’t find the right info on, so I wrote out the items for each day in a note in my phone so I could look it up later and enter it all, which I did.

And even though since that trip (I reached my largest goal before that trip, which was why I was extra strict with myself about no cheat days) I’ve begun to allow myself the occasional cheat day and over the holidays allowed myself a bit more caloric freedom, I still follow all of the above rules of looking every single thing up first, before I eat it. Even if it’s a food I commonly eat and know the exact calories, I always enter it first, so I’m sure not to forget it and so I see the instant change in my remaining calories. There are times I even map out meals days, or even weeks in advance.

But reading here, it seems like a common theme is that people eat first, track later. Or that not everything they eat gets entered into the log. (just today someone posted an article about how common it is to lie about calories consumed) And I was wondering if that was really the norm, because if so, I'm way outside of the norm. lol

Doing everything above doesn’t stress me out, in fact, I have a lot of fun with the app. Especially when I’m meal planning. I love looking up different foods and seeing how one or the other fits into my day or week. I don’t obsess over the number itself, I just want to make sure that absolutely everything is accounted for since that was the whole reason I downloaded an app to keep track of everything.

But seeing how free and easy most folks here seem to be about it all, I am admittedly starting to get a little self-conscious about the way I log. Does anyone else stay uber-detailed like this on their log or am I being way OCD about this?