Help?! I’m struggling with tracking
clincoln2020
Posts: 2 Member
I track until I go to dinner or like today, a bridal shower. Any best practices or tips? It seems overwhelming to figure out how to track those meals. Thank you!
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Replies
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What you do on average, over a period of time, matters much more than what you do on a rare day.
Regular dinners: That, you need to master. Maybe a lighter breakfast/lunch, if that works for you? Some people even find it easy to skip breakfast altogether, eat 2 larger meals. Figure out what works for you.
The rare day with a special event, like the bridal shower? That matters little, as long as rare.
Figure out your calorie needs to maintain your current weight. Anything between your weight loss calorie goal and that number is a fat loss for the day . . . maybe just a smaller one than if you'd hit goal calories.
Anything over that is a delay in reaching goal weight. How much delay? It matters how many extra calories, how often. Look at your weekly totals, do the math.
Weight loss is IMO about realistic sustainability, and averages: A science fair experiment.
Making it a moral battle between exact good, and abject failure, one day or meal at a time? Not helpful.
You can do this!4 -
Thank you for answering! I agree but it seems I’m out more often for events. Do you have a way of dealing with that? For example, if you are traveling. I’ve tried to just say, “chicken salad” and pick a random one but I wondered if there is a better way. Again, thank you!1
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clincoln2020 wrote: »Thank you for answering! I agree but it seems I’m out more often for events. Do you have a way of dealing with that? For example, if you are traveling. I’ve tried to just say, “chicken salad” and pick a random one but I wondered if there is a better way. Again, thank you!
You have two options...either use a generic entry that sounds close to what you ate, or try to dissect the ingredients of what you ate and log them individually. For chicken salad, you'd log chicken breast, mayonnaise, apple, celery, or whatever was all in it.
It's going to be an estimate either way, but it's better than not logging at all.0 -
If you eat out often, I would suggest looking up menus ahead of time if possible and tracking it before you go. I am less likely to over-order if I already know what fits into my daily calories. And if you can't - as you track more and more at home using a scale, eyeballing your serving in a restaurant will be easier.1
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clincoln2020 wrote: »Thank you for answering! I agree but it seems I’m out more often for events. Do you have a way of dealing with that? For example, if you are traveling. I’ve tried to just say, “chicken salad” and pick a random one but I wondered if there is a better way. Again, thank you!
I think others gave you good advice. When traveling - unless deliberately indulging as part of a vacation - I'd normally try to stick with less calorie-dense foods, and foods that are simpler to log (without going as far as dumb amounts of self-denial). I understand that if you're eating at business events during that kind of travel, you eat what's presented.
For something like chicken salad, I'd try to estimate/recall the portion size, and do as you suggested: Look up generic entries, and pick one with a quantity measure (not just "one serving") that's mid to high in calorie content among those listed, and/or labeled as if from some documented source (major restaurant chain, college dormitory food service corporation, major grocery chain, that sort of thing).
For the serving size, you may be able to guess cups/liters or some other volume measure - and will, as mentioned above, get better at estimating over time, with home logging experience to guide your estimates. Another option is to make a mental note of size in terms of "half the palm of my hand" or something, and figure out details later. If circumstances allow - as they don't always! - I've even quietly taken out my phone as if to check an incoming text message or some other socially acceptable excuse, and snapped a photo of my plate (no flash!) with a fork or something in the frame for scale. That makes it easier to estimate later.
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For restaurant/conference/assorted catering food I occasionally look at online menus at other restaurants.
For example, the coffee shop across the street from home does this amazing millionaire's shortbread doughnut, but since it's a small business, there's no nutrition info available. Instead of guessing, I went to a website for a large business that is required to post their calories and found something that looks roughly like what I had and just logged that.
The more I log, the better I get at guessing a reasonable value, the less I need to do that.1 -
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Starting_Again_Again wrote: »
For me, it works best to think of weight management just as a series of choices, with pros and cons, short and long term implications, tradeoffs.
Sometimes eating over maintenance is 100% worth it, to me. I simply need to be willing to accept and accommodate the results.
One choice or one day isn't a success or failure, IMO. Finding happy short/long term balance, and hanging onto that balance long term, is success. Not hitting that good balance is a sign that I need to keep thinking, problem solving, adjusting tactics and habits.
(FWIW, I'm in year 6+ at a healthy weight now, after 30 previous years of overweight/obesity. So far, it's going OK, I guess.)2 -
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I ALWAYS look at the menu online before I go out to eat. It's not a perfect guess, but I'm pretty good an ballparking the calories in a meal now0
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I don't want to blame/shame you. This is just a different point of view to perhaps think about. Some others have written about this...just let it go if you are out and over-indulge. Let the fact it is an issue for you go. At the same time, check in with yourself on other choices you make. Some wrote of business event dinners, sure, do that. The other times you eat out, you might try to cut those number. If you are successful in eating out 20% less, and you continue to miss out on logging those remaining meals, it all might lead to the same place of moving toward your goal weight. Keep doing what you are now, and focus on reducing the excess meals out if you can. Good luck.1
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Fit2btied2016 wrote: »
NB: Some people use irregular measurements for "cup" on here I find. One cup is 8 0z. (not 6), and 250 mL (not 240 mL), as one example.
1 cup (a volume) is actually 237 (rounded) mL but is usually rounded to 240 mL for labeling purposes. It is also always 8 fluid oz (a volume measurement) but a lot of people get volume and weight confused. This is often the reason why many listings will be off. So a cup (8 fluid oz) may weigh 6 oz (avoirdupois or by weight) depending on what it contains.
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So am I. I honestly don't understand this whole fascination with "cups" and the like. I find it imprecise and have no need for it. I just use a scale, which makes it easy to measure everything and easy to calculate the energy levels of what I eat. A "cup of baby spinach" is a totally useless quantity to me, as is a "cup of strawberries" or a "cup of French fries". In my opinion, food is already inherently imprecise because it is –at least initially– created by nature and dependent on circumstances that are only partly under human control and I see no need to add to that lack of precision by using measurement systems that are guaranteed to be wrong.Fit2btied2016 wrote: »Thanks, but I'm in Canada.
Unfortunately, most foods in Canada that have a label do not state the quantity per 100 g, but fortunately, they almost always state the number of grams per serving for solids or the number of ml per serving for liquids, so determining the energy content is really easy using a simple calculator. Sometimes, I simplify. For example, a bag of No Name "winter vegetables" is 20 Kcal and 85 g per serving. Since I eat in portions of 250 g (one third of a 750 g bag), I simply multiply those 20 Kcal by 3 and get 60 Kcal. That gives me 60 Kcal, whereas a precise calculation would give me 58.82 Kcal. That is well within the accuracy range of food, so it is not worth bothering to get any closer.
As for special events, I either avoid them (which is easy during COVID) or I simply eat a small portion, log it at 1000 Kcal per meal and don't think about it anymore. That is almost guaranteed to be somewhat of an overestimate, so even though it is not really important, it is essentially "close enough".
An added advantage is that there are no imperial, avoirdupois, Khmer or Japanese grams. They are all the same grams, so the measurements are universal. It does not matter whether one lives in Zimbabwe or North Carolina, in Tuktoyaktuk or in Oudenaarde. Why make life more complicated than it needs to be?
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