Meals out?

Or you can mentally deconstruct the dish and log the individual ingredients. This is easier if you're an experienced cook, or if the meal is fairly straightforward and you can basically see everything you're eating (e.g, a simply grilled steak, chop, or fish is easier to guesstimate than a dish with lots of ingredients like a casserole, stew or soup).

M

Leverfam wrote: »

If you are watching what you eat - you choose the restaurant and do your homework first. Most restaurants post the nutritional info for their meals so you can plan in advance.

In California only chain restaurants with more than 20 locations do it because it is the law. Small or local places don’t.

OP, I don't log unless I prepare the meals myself or if the restaurant has the nutritional information in their menu or website (most of the places that I eat at don't have it). For me it doesn't make sense to spend time looking in the database for something similar or trying to blindly use estimated calories because I know that it will not be accurate. But that's it just me.

I do make a note in the Comments section of my food diary detailing what I ate and where and that's all. Since I don't always eat all my exercise calories, I always have a buffer that covers for those odd situations.