Anxiety eating foods prepared by others?

I trust the skills I have developed over time and make my best estimation. I have no reason to freak out over 1 meal being off.

i try to stay clear of being put in situations like that. why not pack your own lunch so you can have peace of mind? or copy your works salad with your own ingredients? when i can't help it at all, i try my best to estimate and i always estimate high.

I eat lunch at the work canteen each weekday, and to be honest I'm guessing quite a bit. The canteen is required to post nutritional information, but more often than not I think they take that information from here (home cooked meals or big caterers) or just make it up. The basmati rice for example is 189kcal, 8g fat, 24g carbs, 4g protein. It doesn't work out mathematically and it doesn't taste like they really put that much fat in it. But I think they are overestimating big time and log it as this. With things they seem to underestimate (chicken spinach curry for 90kcal) I do take the weight for the chicken, and add a bit of curry sauce based on recipies I find online. I usually bring little containers to the canteen and put my food into those. Those I can put on a scale. I did this mediculously in the beginning but am mainly doing spot checks now (I have a hard time estimating vegetable curries, though rice and protein are pretty spot on), and I'm still losing.

My opinion is...there's not much in a salad that you need to worry about, except croutons and the dressing! That's where all the calories and carbs are! The advice you've gotten is good...just estimate the best you can, and if after a couple of weeks you are not losing, then maybe it IS a little more than you thought. I highly doubt it, though. Like I said, not much to worry about!! (now if it were fried chicken and gravy with mashed potatoes, that's a whole 'nother story!!)

I don't stress over it.

But maybe your in a different boat eating a unknown meal everyday. For me meals that I'm really unsure about are rare and won't destroy my weight loss.

Maybe over estimate it a little to be on the safe side. Say it's 800kj enter it as 1000kj

Or if it's really causing stress or anxiety maybe don't eat all your kj those days, basically the same as over estimating.

I don't think the feeling of being full can gauge calories, because sometimes I can eat 1k worth of spaghetti and still be hungry, but what a can of tuna and feel full for hours. In my opinion, protein makes me feel satisfied for the longest amount of time. Like someone said before, the calories lay in what you put on it. Opt out for the croutons and get your dressing on the side. Without that, what's in it? Vegetables and cheese, maybe an egg, some lean meats. All pretty reasonable. Guess the best you can, wait a few weeks and see if you're dropping weight. Then tinker around with it to get the results you want.

What kind of salad is it? Depending on if it is meat or cheese or just salady things like lettuce and tomatoes could make a huge difference to calories. Ask for no dressing. If it's chicken, look at the size of the pieces / pieces together and then do a one off weigh at home of a similar size and you'll have a decent guestimate for future reference. Same with the cheese or whatever else you have on it.

Your issues go way past even the normalized amount of obsessiveness that MFPers tend to have about the food scale.

Seriously, if you can't eat the occasional restaurant meal or meal cooked by a friend without going berzerk, then you need to get some help. I don't say that to be mean or judgmental, but just to point out that this sort of stress is not something you should have to just deal with or live with.

It's commendable to want to stick to your calorie goal. But over- or under-estimating by a few hundred calories on occasion is not going to throw you off course. It's just too small a discrepancy to matter in the long run. Maybe you'll lose the weight 0.01% slower. But who cares? There's no race to the finish line.

And, not to stress you out further, but a certain amount of inaccuracy is inevitable even when you make all your own food and weigh everything. Nutritional information can be off by up to 20% on packaging sometimes. The exact calories in everything you eat can never be known to that degree of precision.

Do the best you can, log and track, and you'll know if it's working based on the results you get. And don't stress about the occasional non-homecooked meal. Life is too important to turn yourself into a lab rat.

I honestly think you are stressing too much about it. From what you say it is mainly salad vegetables. One way to get round this is to add to your 'snacks' an item called 'incidentals, vitamins,bites, tastes' - it adds 100 calories to your intake and should cover the odd variation in the amount of feta, nuts etc in your daily salad. Just decide on a calorie amount for the salad, if over the period of a month you are not loosing any weight while still coming in under your alowance, then you may need to adjust the salad calories upwards.

fourteeners wrote: »

I've only lost 7 pounds in the past three weeks, and this week with my period, less than 1 pound! I don't know why my body isn't losing more. I'm discouraged and don't know what to do!

That's too fast. You should be losing more slowly than that.

myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1575987-eating-disorder-resources

Fast weight loss is not OK because it puts your body through high stress, not to mention extreme deprivation of things you like can put you back into a binge phase after a while, ruining all your hard work.

As for not knowing exactly how many calories something is, every count is an estimate, no matter how good, they are never super precise. And they don't need to be. The goal, remember, is to create a calorie deficit, not to obsess over individual items of food or workout routines. So live a little and eat your work salad.