Break meals down item by item?

Depends on what is happening.

When I eat out, it's "find something similar". When I eat at home, I'll take the time to input as a recipe. Especially since if it's good I'll probably make it again.

I also like to do it ahead of time (not after I've eaten). That way I can choose to cut things out/find alternatives if I don't like the calorie count.

I do agree it can be a PITA (especially on the smartphone). So if the recipe is too large I'll head to the website.

clags301 wrote: »

I always break it down, for the reason you mention. Why bother tracking at all if you're not going to be accurate?

This for sure. I'm not logging a bunch of stuff I didn't actually eat just to keep a log.

I break down the meal and enter it into MFP's recipe builder. When I title the meal, I put a serving size in parentheses like this: Spaghetti with meat sauce (250 g). Usually we make our meals fairly similarly each time. Maybe it's not the exact same amount of ground beef, but for my purposes it's close enough. So then I can use that meal entry again and I have the weight of a serving size already in my title. If I make it differently, like we use meatballs instead of meat sauce, or we use elbow noodles instead of spaghetti noodles, then I make a new entry.

I just wing it if I go out to eat or eat at somebody's house.

I break it down. I just jot things on a recycled junk-mail envelope as I weigh them, while cooking, so I don't get my electronic device all ooky, then record it after the meal. Easy & quick.

Things I repeat frequently (like my regular 11-item (!) oatmeal breakfast) I store as a meal. Things I make and will eat for a while (like frozen crustless mini-quiches for the freezer) are stored as a recipe.

I vary things enough that stuff I need drops out of the recent/frequent list, but it's probably only around 10% of the items or so.

An accurate log is a boon, not just for tracking calories to lose, but so you can predict your personal loss rate when changing calories, estimate the impact of over-goal days (figure how many more days to goal, or how many deficit days it'll take to be back to even again), recognize when a scale gain must be water weight and estimate how much, and predict eventual maintenance calories.

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I break it down. I want to log as accurately as possible, or my mind starts thinking WTH and I end up eating over my goal.

I have a number of repeat recipes stored, which helps. Salads are the biggest pain for me to log because they're always different, but I tend not to be AS exact there with the low-cal items. 2 cups of lettuce vs 3 is a difference of about 3 calories. Dressing, cheese, egg, nuts, etc, I definitely log accurately.

I break it down and log all the ingredients separately. It's a bit cumbersome but it's the only way I can get true accuracy.

purrrmeowww wrote: »

I often will just search something similar when I make a dinner - e.g. shrimp linguine or chicken curry with rice, but of course the ranges for calories in those items that come up is huge. I just feel like it's a ridiculous amount of effort to go: 100g pasta, 1 tbsp oil, one tomato, etc.

Who actually breaks it down and who just wings it?

I've mostly entered my recipes into the recipe builder and log it that way because I do follow the recipe every time.
If it is something like tacos then I enter the items individually because I might have different toppings or use ground turkey instead of ground beef.

Everybody who wants to lose weight using MFP does...

It's a lot easier than you think. Once you get used to it it takes very little time. And if you are just going to guess why bother using MFP?