New to the app and how to use it

aidan1949
aidan1949 Posts: 17 Member
in Getting Started
I've started to input what I've eaten an I wanted to bring up a list of what I'd put in to check it. I can't see how to do this? Can anyone help, please. I've just got the free version at the moment.

Replies

  • Unicorn_Bacon
    Unicorn_Bacon Posts: 491 Member
    edited April 2020
    The free version is all you need but I dont really understand what your asking?

    If you add food to your diary, it has to stay logged for it to show up on recently added foods list when you go to add the same food again another day

    Is that what you mean?
  • aidan1949
    aidan1949 Posts: 17 Member
    Thank you for your reply Kriss. I really am new to this! I put in dinner yesterday and breakfast today. I've done a quick calculation on a piece of paper and the Kcal score for my breakfast comes to a higher figure than is showing in my app diary. I guessed that I'd done something incorrectly when I put my breakfast into the app this morning and I wanted to check it and correct the list. I couldn't find a way to do that.
  • Unicorn_Bacon
    Unicorn_Bacon Posts: 491 Member
    I see..

    Here is what you need to know..

    The food list created by MyFitnessPal is user created so there's going to be a lot of entries in there that are not correct so often times even if you use the barcode scanner you might end up with different nutritional information

    The best thing you can do is use an entry that is closest to what the box or can or packaging says

    Unfortunately there are a lot of users who track different things some people only track calories some people track calories of carbs some people only track carbs some people only track protein some people don't care about salt and other people do so you're going to find a lot of incomplete entries where some people don't enter the information you may be interested in tracking

    If that's the case you can manually track that yourself using a piece of paper as you have or you can go into the my Foods tab which should be in your diary and create your own food and just make sure to save it as a private entry

    By creating your own food you can put in all the information that is relevant to you and the accurate amount of calories and use those entries for your own personal log
  • Unicorn_Bacon
    Unicorn_Bacon Posts: 491 Member
    My other suggestion to you is that you log each individual item

    Some people have the tendency to log items as they are

    So for example let's say somebody had a cheese omelet for breakfast they would then go to MyFitnessPal and search for cheese omelette however everybody's cheese omelette is going to be different some people are going to use different sized eggs some people are going to use different kinds of cheese or different amounts of cheese some people have different cooking methods so it's important that you log your omelette as separate things

    If your omelette used to medium eggs search for medium eggs if your omelette used to half a cup of cheese and you don't use a food scale to weigh your food log the cheese is 1/2 cup of cheese or find an entry that has the gram weight of the amount of cheese you used if you're using a food scale and then if you used any oil or butter in the pan to cook your omelette you should log that as well

    For foods like meat and produce I find searching for usda entries is best

    If I had carrots for supper I search for "usda carrots raw"

    If I had chicken breast -- "usda chicken breast raw"

    Ideally raw weights are best but if it's already cooked, you can change "raw" to "cooked" for an entry for cooked food as well..
  • Unicorn_Bacon
    Unicorn_Bacon Posts: 491 Member
    You are still going to get a lot of different amounts of calories for different things even using the USDA entries just like anything else some of the entries have a green check mark that validate how accurate they are but if there isn't anything like that the next best thing you can do is look at all the entries and figure out what the best average is.

    If I looked up chicken breast and I saw entries for 3oz. All ranging from 120 calories to almost 300 calories, first I would see which number appears more often. If I saw 140 more often for 3oz. I would just use that. If not then I would try and find a reasonable half way point between both extremes.

    You can also google nutritional information on google and they will give you a calorie amount based on weight to help give you the closest entry to choose.
  • aidan1949
    aidan1949 Posts: 17 Member
    Thanks for your reply Kriss and the explanation. Let me tell you what I've tried...

    I clicked 'diary' and I saw 'Breakfast' at the top. It had remembered an entry for two slices of bread and two eggs that I had put in and it came to 220. All that it had listed was 'slice bread, 2.0 slice' and the eggs were not on the list. I also put in the Chilli con Carne I had the night before but it wasn't shown. I'd really like to be able to see a list of dates and alongside it my meal records!
  • swirlybee
    swirlybee Posts: 497 Member
    On the app, near the top, click on "Today" and you should be able to change the date to yesterday's date, then tap on the checkmark. That should show you your entries for yesterday.
  • aidan1949
    aidan1949 Posts: 17 Member
    Thanks swirlybee that's helped me find my way through to the list and adding to it. Scary how quickly it builds up! In my updated list I can see checkboxes next to each item that I've put in. What is the relevance of these, please?

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