MFP Food Diary vs. Handwritten Diary

depends on where I am. If I am gonna be out of the house all day, I keep a handwritten one, and transfer the info to MFP in the evening. MFP is invaluable for the calorie counting aspect.

i did for a long time. but then i was always logging on to figure out the calories in something. this actually seemed quicker now that ive gotten the hang of it. was easier to just 'guess' on paper

I have a hard time believing writing stuff down in a notebook and calculating the calories and macros by hand is faster than letting a calculator designed to do these calculations do its job. The calculator does all the work for you, all you have to do is find an item in the database.

I don't know...it's pretty damned easy.

When I was in active weight loss phase I did a handwritten one because I was only tracking calories and it was easier to just make note of calories as I ate them (I didn't even write down the food-just the calorie numbers). Now I'm in maintenance and focusing on macros, so I'm here using MFP's food diary to track those

isulo_kura wrote: »

bbutler921 wrote: »

Anyone else prefer to use a handwritten food diary vs MFP? Logging in a notebook seems much quicker and easier to go back and look what I ate in the past.

Does your notebook have a database of 1000s of foods and their nutritional information? If not and you still have to look it up somewhere you may as well look it up on MFP and add it to your diary.

If your happy doing it your way fine but I can't see how you can get the accuracy. Logging on MFP is as hard as you want to make it. I spend around 5-10 minutes at most a day logging

When I did it in a notebook it was very accurate-I just looked at the nutritional labels and then made note of the calories in my nobebook. For things that didn't have a label, like veggies, I used nutritional data to find the info (memorized my regulars pretty quickly though).

I do both - i make a meal plan for the week on MFP to meet my macros, then it gets written in to a note book. It's easier to refer to, and a good record..... I'm on my 3rd book.

I do both. I keep MFP updated with my phone/work computer, but for some reason writing it down old-school style really helps me stay on target. Plus its easier for me to just hand my notebook to my coach/dietician and say "what did I miss?"

Are you using the mobile app? So quick & so easy. You're phone is always at your fingertips.

I've done the notebook thing kind of listing of food/calories to establish a baseline of what a normal week looked like prior to reducing the food. I found out that the "suggested" MFP was like half of what I normally ate which explained why I couldn't keep it up and was always starving - too big a drop at a time. It also got me in the habit of documenting. I've gotten better about estiguessing sizes and to listening to my body as to how full I really am, so I'm not currently logging or measuring too actively right now.

I think the reason calorie counting is so much more popular than it used to be is because, thanks to technology, it's so much more accessible than it used to be.

Programs like Weight Watchers and the like became really popular in the days when calorie counting with any kind of accuracy was a giant hassle. You had to log by hand, and look up foods in a huge book with thousands of foods, and it took forever. Weight Watchers and similar programs aimed to simplify the process, and that was not perfect but it was "good enough" for many people.

But now, with free apps like MFP doing all the hard work for you, there's no real benefit to using those simplified programs versus calorie counting.

I'm old fashioned about a lot of things, too, but tracking calories is so much easier with the app.

I use a standard steno notebook, but MFP as well.But this is not really for dietary reasons. I'm diabetic, on a very intensive regime, and therefore have to take lots of notes, numbers and so forth throughout each day of my life. The notes I made about food were useful, but they were jotted down very quickly, and really didn't give me much the guidance for future meals (or much useful overview of medical problems) . Since I've got going with MFP, things have been a breeze! I live in the UK, and shop online from Waitrose/Ocado, so I find that the database already holds most of my food choices. (I'm in the process of transferring over all my custom foods from fitday and I must say that so far I've had to input very very few foods.) A really big advantage of using MFP is that you can transfer daily menus to other dates as long as you know when you put them all in. I keep a record of this, a little index, and when I come across really lovely menus that I want to try again I just go back to '04 – 02-THU' or whatever and copy it to a new date. People seem toImostly eat the same things anyway, so once you have, say, a month or so oif really nice daily menus, the thought processes can ease up a bit! This is especially true if you are on a very strict ketogenic diet, which I am at the moment. It's sometimes very hard to come up with the interesting things on a daily basis so having this sort of backlog of useful menus so easy to hand is very useful. In academic terms, I suppose my scrolled and pitifully messy notebooks on my "primary source" and what I actually printout in Word, with the daily menu on one side and a massive technical diabetes things on the other side are turning out to make a very useful historical report of how it's all going. Generally speaking the advertising for this site says you can lose weight a lot faster if you do it with friends – this is certainly true, but from the diabetic point of view it's also made a world of difference in the way I track and can keep in contro of my now quite normal blood sugar results (between 4.5 and 5.5). I keep a little daily graph of my BG readings as well, and they are starting to go across the grass in a very gentle wavy line rather than in constant zigzags. It's easier to keep track of just how your you are progressing, so I would say use MFP as well. But hey, each to their own way of doing things. I probably wouldn't be doing any of this if I didn't have to!

segacs wrote: »

I think the reason calorie counting is so much more popular than it used to be is because, thanks to technology, it's so much more accessible than it used to be.

Programs like Weight Watchers and the like became really popular in the days when calorie counting with any kind of accuracy was a giant hassle. You had to log by hand, and look up foods in a huge book with thousands of foods, and it took forever. Weight Watchers and similar programs aimed to simplify the process, and that was not perfect but it was "good enough" for many people.

But now, with free apps like MFP doing all the hard work for you, there's no real benefit to using those simplified programs versus calorie counting.

I'm old fashioned about a lot of things, too, but tracking calories is so much easier with the app.

I agree with this a LOT! I'm not old by any means, but I know that even when I was first starting to look at weight loss in school I had so few options. I think that easy access to programs such as MFP and Sparkpeople and such will start showing up soon in the statistics of people who successfully keep weight off after losing it!

I print my logs from MFP and put them in a notebook that I keep in my locker at work. It is nice to see those entries in solid state. I also sometimes thumb through my book of wisdom for inspiration and food choices I know I liked.