Are you tracking food perfectly?

Eating out you just have to estimate or hope the counts from the restaurant are accurate.

At home I weigh most things, and a few I measure with cups and spoons. I measure salt containing herb blends, but other spices I don't worry about, I need to watch sodium for medical reasons.

In short, no I'm not, but the minute I start struggling to lose weight I will tighten up. The moment I can't get away with not logging some small bits I will start being as close to 100% as possible (restaurant food will always be a guesstimate).

A: I track it if I'm preparing it at home and if I am not having a 'don't really care' moment. I had an hour of 'don't really care' yesterday morning so my logged food from yesterday is not entirely accurate, but I wasn't out-of-control and it's not a problem to solve. Basically, I'd worked a 20-hour day Thursday and ate all my Friday calories for breakfast. That's not going to happen often so it's not a problem. Today I'm back on a normal sort of schedule and my normal sort of day has a normal (for me) sort of breakfast at a normal sort of breakfast time. That means that my breakfast smoothie recipe in the mfp recipe database was updated this morning with precise values. I even weighed the coffee in my coffee pot in grams and converted that to cups for my black coffee entry.

B: This is a compromise. I know that some restaurants don't even suggest nutritional information on their web site, and those which do don't have any way of controlling their chefs and you may get much more or even less calories than any published chart suggests. As I understand a little about mass-market food, I can state with some confidence that the most accurate published restaurant calorie claims are for the big fast food chains, with McDonald's as most accurate just because they are most focused on by the press. My compromise is that I choose not to get an entree' for an evening meal as it is too easy to eat too much at a casual dining restaurant. I just get a salad, without dressing, and avoid the bread.

No, right now I am not logging at all.. plus my food scale broke. I will start logging if I begin to struggle though.
Back in the day when I was tracking, I weighed most of my food but not all, and I guessed when I ate out. It wasn't the most accurate but it worked for me. But I had a lot of wiggle room and I was good at eyeballing.

livingleanlivingclean wrote: »

wellnesschaser wrote: »

I don't think it's possible to measure perfectly! I aim for brutal honesty and erring on the side of "yeah, I probably had a 1/4 serving more of potato than I'd like to admit."

The accountability part works because I'm thinking through what I eat BEFORE I even let myself get tempted. With the exception of last night, lol.

But if you weigh the potato and only eat what you log (in grams), surely you're being as accurate as you possibly can?

True!

Nope. I don't have a scale. I do try to measure occasionally to make sure I'm on track.

I have a scale, and occasionally even use it.
When eating out, I make a best effort to estimate what I'm eating, if it's not already in the MFP database or printed on the menu (typically it is both or neither). When possible, I research nutrition info on the web prior to ordering anything.

I measure most stuff since I went 3 weeks at the same weight and it really makes a difference. Eating out, i try to reconstruct the meal here; if I can't I guesstimate. As you said, that's all you can do. And there are so many suggestions floating around about how to control your portions when you go out.

This content has been removed.

Yesterday someone gave me a pastry that they made themselves and I couldn't say no to something that looked so delicious. I just try and over-estimate how many calories things like this have in them to hopefully make up for it.

Gallowmere1984 wrote: »

pinuplove wrote: »

No one here is tracking food perfectly. I suspect some people get a lot closer than others (looking at you Gallowmere ) but perfect isn't possible. I personally aim for 'good enough to keep me on track with my goals' which seems to be working. I still have meals out, work events, meals my husband prepared that I didn't hover over his shoulder weighing everything, family potlucks, etc. Life doesn't stand still because I'm trying to lose weight, and I wouldn't want it to.

Nothing really standstill about it for me. It's just part of my daily routine. I am bulking now and still do it. I wake up at 1:30, spend a couple of hours prepping food and typing my lift programming into my phone notepad, out the door by 5:00, lifting by 5:30, at work by 7:00, in bed around 5:30.

Most people have their "me time" after work. I have mine in the very early morning, when I don't have to worry about the rest of the world trying to *kitten* it up.

Didn't mean to imply you don't have a life! Our lives, goals, and priorities are very different. I'll happily keep up my sloppy-logging until it no longer works for me, then I'll cry tears of bitter irony and tighten things up lol.

pinuplove wrote: »

Gallowmere1984 wrote: »

pinuplove wrote: »

No one here is tracking food perfectly. I suspect some people get a lot closer than others (looking at you Gallowmere ) but perfect isn't possible. I personally aim for 'good enough to keep me on track with my goals' which seems to be working. I still have meals out, work events, meals my husband prepared that I didn't hover over his shoulder weighing everything, family potlucks, etc. Life doesn't stand still because I'm trying to lose weight, and I wouldn't want it to.

Nothing really standstill about it for me. It's just part of my daily routine. I am bulking now and still do it. I wake up at 1:30, spend a couple of hours prepping food and typing my lift programming into my phone notepad, out the door by 5:00, lifting by 5:30, at work by 7:00, in bed around 5:30.

Most people have their "me time" after work. I have mine in the very early morning, when I don't have to worry about the rest of the world trying to *kitten* it up.

Didn't mean to imply you don't have a life! Our lives, goals, and priorities are very different. I'll happily keep up my sloppy-logging until it no longer works for me, then I'll cry tears of bitter irony and tighten things up lol.

Hehe. You sound an aweful lot like me.

As long as I'm losing weight (or happy maintaining as is the case right now), I'll keep up with my sloppy-logging. I tend to be as accurate as I need to be for my goals.

I have to say I do not always weigh my food. I try to be as accurate as possible

......and protein

I do it basically like you, OP, when I am logging carefully (when maintaining I typically do not log). I guess and round up restaurant choices or, when that feels overwhelming and based on my experience over quite a while now, I might just pick a round number that seems reasonable to high for what I got. I do think awareness and not going nuts at restaurants (watching portion size and choosing sensibly what you order, being aware of high cal items that you could eat without thinking about it, like many appetizers, desserts, and bread on the table) is a big enough change and that you don't need to be totally perfect. I lost on schedule almost the whole time I was losing (about a year) and ate out 1-2 times a week in restaurants with no calorie counts and am glad I didn't give that up or stress about it.