Upset

I'm going to give you a very hard truth, and one people don't like to hear.

we are ALL busy.

maybe with different THINGS, but we are all busy.

It's an excuse.

I eat out fairly regularly, always have. I plan for it. I am a creature of habit, and generally get the same thing at the same places. I go in stages of logging my food NOW, but have been on MFP for almost a decade and lost over 200 pounds. I am pretty darn good at knowing how many calories I am taking in. But, that came with a LOT of practice, and I do go in stages of logging now (I still have a few pounds to go but am not as fastidious about that as I once was, even as recently as earlier this year).

You make time for, or put the effort into, what is important to you. plain and simple. Most chains have calorie counts on their websites so you can plan ahead. Find the corresponding entry in MFP to log it. For places that do not... find a chain that has similar food and find a similar item and go by that. Shoot, when im being super lazy, ill use a restaurant entry for something ive made at home that i KNOW is fewer calories (case in point, i made tacos recently. mine come out to around 200 calories each - i used a taco bell entry that was higher. i just didnt care. i didnt feel like logging correctly LMAO) but again... i know what mine are typically because ive logged them MANY times - the CORRECT way LOL i was simply being lazy that day

as far as consistency goes? well... thats on you. habits take time to build. i failed MANY times before I became consistent at logging. And then at exercising. keep doing it. even when you forget a meal. or a day. or days. when youre a kid, eventually you remember to brush your teeth every day without being told, right? same thing. eventually this becomes HABIT as well.

You CAN do this. you just have to WANT to.

^This really is the heart of it.

You have to decide you care, and find the time. The truth is, it doesn't require any great amount of time to log your food and stop eating when you run out of calories. What takes time is working on your mindset and making it a thing you prioritize, and patience while you learn and experiment.

I spent a good month or more changing nothing but just logging to see what my food choices looked like translated to normal and a couple of more set to maintain and experimenting with what worked and what didn't. I didn't intentionally increase my activity, I didn't do any massive diet overhaul. Just little things, one at a time. At my most intensive it was 10 minutes a day, tops, if we included browsing menus. Now it's about 90 seconds to plug my food in and move on because most of what I eat is already in my history.

But you really really have to decide this is important to you, because when it's not important ANY amount of effort is too much. You have to put yourself at the top of your own priority list.