Over whelmed

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Fitlifestyle4life
Fitlifestyle4life Posts: 53 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
so I don't know how to put my workouts. Is complex to put the weight and can't find squats or other workouts I do. Same goes for food I have trouble putting my food

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  • Christine_72
    Christine_72 Posts: 16,049 Member
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    Young fella. You need to put your thinking cap on.
    Fiddle around with the data base. Be patient, you'll figure it out.

    MFP has to be one of the most simple apps I've ever used :+1:
  • MakePeasNotWar
    MakePeasNotWar Posts: 1,329 Member
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    It takes some time at first, but if you are willing to put in the time finding all the entries you need, MFP will save your frequent entries and you'll be able to find them and add them very quickly soon.

    My meals tend to have 5-10 ingredients and I don't use recipes, so it used to take me several minutes for each meal to find the right entries and enter them. Now I just go to my "frequent" tab, check off the items I want, and click add.

    For strength exercises, I frankly don't use MFP. I keep a paper journal and just add "strength training, general" in the exercise tab as a record that I did it. The database is just too small right now, more than 1/2 of the exercises I do aren't in it.

    If you are using the app, look for verified foods so you don't have to check each entry for accuracy (they aren't perfect, but mostly they are reliable). On the web version, pick entries without an asterisk where possible (the asterisk means it's user-submitted, and some of them are way off).

    Like Christine said, be patient, and it will get much faster as you start to build up a history.
  • Machka9
    Machka9 Posts: 25,180 Member
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    christinev297 wrote: »
    Young fella. You need to put your thinking cap on.
    Fiddle around with the data base. Be patient, you'll figure it out.

    MFP has to be one of the most simple apps I've ever used :+1:

    Yes ... I've used at least 3 others, and they were difficult. I ended up having to enter everything because their databases weren't very extensive at all.

    But I've been really impressed with how extensive MFP's food database is. As an example, my manager came around with a box of little Japanese cookies he picked up in one of the local Asian markets. I had two, and then went to log them. I doubted I could find them and figured I'd have to do some sort of estimate. But there they were. Select the item, enter the fact that I had 2. And done. :)

    The only time when food has not appeared in MFP's database is if it is new. I've been trying all sorts of interesting things since I started here, and there have been a small handful of occasions where I've tried something brand new on the grocery store shelves and I've had to enter it. But that hasn't happened very often at all.

  • vivmom2014
    vivmom2014 Posts: 1,647 Member
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    There is a section for strength training under the cardiovascular category. I agree that some of the exercise choices are very strange and a bit frustrating.
  • forgtmenot
    forgtmenot Posts: 860 Member
    edited May 2015
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    Sometimes I don't even bother logging strength training exercises because it doesn't give you a calorie burn anyway. So if it is easier for you maybe just put your strength training exercises in the notes box so you can keep track.
  • juggernaut1974
    juggernaut1974 Posts: 6,212 Member
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    Fitlifestyle4life wrote: »
    so I don't know how to put my workouts. Is complex to put the weight and can't find squats or other workouts I do. Same goes for food I have trouble putting my food

    If you're talking about logging the actual lifts - weights, reps, etc...I'll agree there's probably better apps out there that are more specifically designed for that than MFP, which is primarily focused on just logging the activity vs. the actual numbers.
  • manders_b
    manders_b Posts: 44 Member
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    The strength training part of the MFP database allows you to enter reps, weight per rep and # of sets but doesn't give any calorie info. If you want to, you can add the calories using the strength training entry in the cardio database, but it doesn't add much and I find it difficult to keep track of the minutes spent lifting.

    Once you start entering values for different exercises, they'll come up in your recent/frequent entries on the app and it gets easier from there.
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
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    You'll figure out the food with practice. Don't bother logging the workouts except for the cardio. The workouts won't burn that many more calories than moderate exercise.
  • jkal1979
    jkal1979 Posts: 1,896 Member
    edited May 2015
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    If you are more of a visual learner, you can go on YouTube and find videos on how to log and use MFP. Just make sure that when you search that you put either the app or the website in the search bar. If you are using the app make sure that it's for a recent version of it.

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