Does anyone just eat and estimate the calories?

Yup, add me to the list who estimates. I also used to track meticulously several years back. Every once in a while I'll log again just to make sure I'm still on track.

I log everything I eat - but I don’t weigh my food. I try to measure food but frequently I estimate. It keeps me going. If I am too strict with myself then I stop when I mess up. If I forget to measure I estimate and move on. It’s better, in my opinion, than not being accountable at all. Or worse, stopping altogether.

I mostly estimate, and I think it works better for me overall.

I just pay attention to the direction of the scale, and if it's not going where I want, then something has to change (eg log more accurately, eat less, estimate higher values). For me, if I go for more accurate, I tend to get a bit hung up on the details, and it just takes over and leaves me feeling miserable about it all. I find estimating gives me a better balance.

That said, I will have the occasional day where I try and weigh & log super accurately - gives me a chance to check my estimates to see if I've let my portions creep up etc.

I never try to estimate. Though when I was losing weight I had lunch in the office canteen and had to estimate there. The food was mostly Indian and Arabic, and often high in fat. There was nutritional info available, but the numbers seemed widely off. Unless the fluffy and dry white rice really contained a massive amount of fat. I still logged it with this info, sometimes taking a plastic cup with what I would call a serving size to my desk to weigh it. There I also learned that portion creep is totally real: What I thought was a similarly full service spoon of rice for example became more in a course of just a few days. So I always tried to get food from the top of the tray with more veggies or meat and less sauce.

I used to weigh everything on my food scale when I was really focusing on weight loss. After losing weight and now being in maintenance, I’m not as strict. Plus having used a scale for so long I can eyeball portions really well. Once in a while I’ll eat like crap for a few days and to get “locked back in” I’ll use the food scale, but not too often. And I TOTALLY agree with you about the anxiety part! 😜

it’s just impossible to measure everything if you are the type who eats out most of the time. a muffin in one place is going to be different from a muffin in another and who the heck carries a weighing scale around with them on the go? i mean, kudos to the person who carries around a packed lunch everyday but i would rather someone who’s a better cook than i am prepare me a delicious hot lunch 😂 i estimate all the time and exercise enough that i have a little wiggle room for bad estimation. so far, it’s all good 😎

I maintained for awhile doing that, and then the weight started creeping back on. I think it's hard to estimate because even just 100-200 calories every day really adds up over time. Thankfully I don't really mind logging. I do estimate when I go to restaurants. I'm bummed when they don't have calorie info available, but I'm not going to let that stop me from going out to eat. Same thing for potluck type situations (if we ever have those again!)

During non-quarantine times I eat out probably 6 times a week, so learning to make estimations is a big part of the game for me. Even at home, I only weigh very calorie-dense foods like nuts, and occasionally I make some ”check-up” weigh-ins for frequently eaten foods. On top of that, I have measured things like the volume of my favorite mug, so I know my morning orange juice is actually 2,2 deciliters instead of 2, that 10% difference every single morning would add up.

At home I usually estimate based on things like ”my husband and I eat three dinners from one bag of this pasta, so it’s 1/6 of the full bag for one meal”, so I base things on package size. I know I’ll probably have to move to tighter logging when there’s less to lose, but so far things have been working like this.

5 years ago I lost 90lbs in a year by weighing, measuring and counting everything. I thought "hey, I'm pretty good at this, I can just estimate from now on!" Yeah, so I gained 50 lbs back and now have to work that much harder to get back to where I was, never mind getting to my goal! So please don't do it, just stick with the plan and enter your foods. It takes time, but it's worth it!

I just started to get back on measuring/weighting/entering 2 months ago and I'm down from 232 to 215.

If I go out, I estimate. But I estimate based on known quantities. Ie, if I have a pastry at a no-name local bakery, I'll correlate it roughly to a similar pastry at Panera Bread. It might be more, it might be less, but it'll be roughly equivalent.

I use my food scale on food I know I could overeat (Tostadas lime chips, yum yum, or granola; interestingly, I found that I always charge a full serving of peanut butter, but turns out I only use about half that naturally), but I don't live and die by the food scale either. Some weeks I go down, some weeks I go up, but overall, I'm down 100lbs. If I notice an upward trend, I tighten up my logging, but in general, I figure that I will be about +/-20% off any given week. I could be "done" by now if I were less lazy, but here I am. I am not going to change me, so I've found a way to make me work for me!

I don't particularly want to log the rest of my life (I have zero emotional attachment to logging, I am just that lazy XD), but I don't want the weight to come back even more than I don't want to log. So when I'm "done"? Who knows. I have a tendency to either undereat (anxiety/emotions steal appetite) or overeat (um, chips, yum?!) my calorie targets so... who knows. I might be "roughly" logging the rest of my life, but eh.

Find what works for you and gives you the results you want!