Tracking Vegan food

No, I will individually add ingredients or make a recipe and track the portion I ate. I feel like your approach would make things quite inaccurate. I am not just tracking calories however, I am also wanting to know how much fiber, carbs, fat, protein etc I am eating in a day so that's why I will always go for the specific items in my dish and not pick one I think is close.

What is your goal in tracking that way? To me, that wouldn't work at all, as I track my calories and macros. I put everything in individually, verify the entry is correct, and weigh and measure my food. I don't see the point of just throwing food into your journal...

No, of course not. I log the items i eat individually and create recipes. if i eat that meal again it's already there for me to select and i know the calories are correct.

whats the point of tracking if you're not going to actually track?


P.S. Think of this... how much pasta are you actually making? What kind of sauce are you using? Don't you think the faux meats like boca/morningstar/etc. are much lower in cals than ground beef? there are too many variations for you to be WAY off.

The macros and calories are likely to be quite different. It would make your tracking wildly inaccurate. Just use the recipe builder.

Any foods cooked at home should be logged ingredient by ingredient or ran through the recipe calculator.

I always use a short cut with the recipe calculator - I just estimate how many portions my cooking will make, and then I'll log how many servings of it I eat. It's not the most accurate method but if I don't make a giant batch and eat it all by myself I'm usually good.

Unless there is no other way, I will enter it individually. The random foods that are entered may just be random #'s someone decided on. It's definitely a PITA to log individually, but it makes it much more accurate. If I have more than 1 serving I will likely use the recipe builder.

stretchingreality wrote: »

So I've been on here for a while now and I thought I would get an opinion on my dilemma, I dont add calories for the individual food stuffs in the meals I cook (I'm lazy) so if I cook a vegan spag bol, I will just put in one of the meat spag bols on the search as there is very rarely a vegan option. Is this what you guys do?

No, your calories and macros will be way off. And since you are vegan, it's especially important to be accurate about your protein.

Afura wrote: »

Unless there is no other way, I will enter it individually. The random foods that are entered may just be random #'s someone decided on. It's definitely a PITA to log individually, but it makes it much more accurate. If I have more than 1 serving I will likely use the recipe builder.

This is what I do. With less complicated recipes I log individual ingredients -- like, if I make roasted potatoes and eat half of them [as measured by weight 98% of the time, by eyeball 2%] I'll log half of everything that went into making that dish, which is usually just oil and potatoes (that I weighed raw; if I used 400g total, then I'd log that I ate 200g raw potatoes). I do it with noodles too; I weigh out 8oz of dry pasta for the family, then divide the cooked weight by eight to figure out how much pasta per ounce to put in my bowl. It makes it a lot easier for me when cooking for a family, without having to make all of my stuff in a different pan to ensure I don't eat too much.

For more complex recipes, I use the recipe builder and create the servings amount based on weigh -- usually 100g, but sometimes different numbers based on what it is. It keeps me as accurate as I can possibly be. I keep a list of each pan's weight in grams on my fridge, so that I can easily measure the total weight of a recipe for the sake of determining how many servings is in it. (So if it's 1000g total of food, the recipe makes 10, 100g servings. I learned this trick really recently on the forums, actually, and it has made logging homemade stuff like soup and casseroles so much less stressful. )

No, Vegans are incapable of gaining weight, getting sick, or dying of cancer. waaaaaait. Yeah log it separate.

Seems pointless. Might as well not log at all.

To me that's the equivalent of saying I couldn't find a Big Mac in the mfp database so I just logged 10 apple.

Is vegan spagbol anything like meat versions, calorie wise or macro wise?

I am sure there are vegan options in the database but I think the recipe builder is your best option, especially if you make it more than once.