Track chaos? or cheat day?

Why wouldn’t you log it? The purpose of logging is to have data that lets you understand weight changes and make informed choices.

Find the database entries that are closest to what you ate and estimate as best you can.

Personally, I find that if I start coming up with reasons not to log, it's a slippery slope. But obviously thats a personal thing, there's no harm in writing off a day as untrackable assuming it's a once in a blue moon sort of thing and it stays that way.

I think it's a useful challenge though to try to track a day like that, especially if you are relatively new to logging. Thinking about portion sizes, trying to figure out how oily or heavy something is, what the ingredients are. You don't have to log as you go, just soon enough that you'll probably remember.

I do generally think guessing is better than nothing, because there are lots of meals in my life I don't prepare myself, I can't just write them all off.

But one way or the other, one day doesn't really make a difference unless it affects subsequent days.

g_racedisneygirl wrote: »

I plan on tracking what can but for some of the sides I wasn't sure how to measure out all the combinations of ingredients,..

Take your best guess at what the ingredients are and the relative proportions of them, and log something appropriate.

If it helps, too, take photos of your plates. It seems like everyone photographs their food these days for Instagram or Facebook, so I'm sure it wouldn't seem odd for you to snap some pics to help you with remembering and logging later!

Have a fun day!

I log everything even when it is guesses on portions. Logging a guess closes that gap on accuracy. If I log 2000 calories and actually eat 2500 I am 500 calories off. If I log nothing I am 2500 calories off. I manage myself by weekly calories and by averages which I count on to be close to accurate.

Plus logging keeps me mindful of what I am eating. There is an accountability to logging that works really well for me.

I log everything and weigh in the next morning no matter what happens. Even if I have to badly guesttimate what took place at a drunken bacchanalia, I log. Once you stop holding yourself accountable, it becomes very easy to not be accountable the next day, and the next, and then it's a year later and time to start all over, from a higher weight.

Also, once you skip logging, you lose the ability to ever go back into the data and figure out important things like "How many calories is my actual break-even, not from a generic calculator app but from my own body?" I can say with dead-on certainty that my NEAT is 2435 calories, from months and months of weight-ins and calorie logging data. That is useful information to have.