not sure where to put this question! Are people finding the meal scanning feature accurate? Looks a little low on the calories. I also find the exercise calories (which I ignore) as far too high.
Some people love the meal scanning feature, if you mean that thing where you take a picture of your meal. I find it much more time-consuming and annoying than helpful, personally . . . but I may eat more unusual things, or more mixed-together so hard to identify things, compared to people who like the feature. Logging food by typing into search works best for me, for a variety of reasons.
For exercise calories, I do log and eat them - have done all through a year of loss and 10 years of successful maintenance since, logging food and exercise both. But I did some research and thinking at first, to try to come up with reasonably accurate ways of estimating calories for the exercises I was doing most often. I use different methods for different exercises. I do find some of MFP's default calorie estimate to be higher than likely true, but not all of them.
Personally, I wouldn't consider not eating exercise calories, either averaged into my base calorie goal, or logged seperately, because I do a fair amount of reasonably intense exercise. Underfueling exercise is counter-productive for performance and fitness improvement, and it can even be counter-productive for weight loss (if too-fast loss causes fatigue so lowered all-day calorie burn). That may not be a big issue for someone doing small-ish amounts of exercise, or who has a very moderate loss rate so going faster isn't risky. Someone who doesn't account for exercise in calorie goal but does a lot of intense exercise is riding for a fall, IMO.
Since much of my exercise is weather-dependent and seasonal, it works best for me to log exercise separately, with as careful calorie estimates as I can reasonably manage. For people with a more consistent, predictable schedule, averaging exercise into base calorie goal may work better. Either method can be fine.
thanks for your reply. I’m not exercising that much - it just estimates way over what one is likely to expend, and I’m well aware one needs to eat more if exercising a lot. I was using that as an example that some features in MFP are inaccurate. I am talking about the scanning feature on MFP specifically. I just scanned dinner. It over calculated my salmon calories by a third. I guess that’s the issue it can’t tell the weight and unless it’s a standard egg/apple/piece of bacon/whatever it’s guessing.
Yeah, I have problems with it not recognizing my food, mis-estimating amounts, of course not necessarily understanding how much butter/oil or cheese might be in a thing, etc. Once I got the things I eat frequently in recent/frequent foods (just by logging them so MFP remembers), they come up quickly on a typed-in search with just a few letters typed in. I routinely use a food scale at home (quicker/easier as well as more accurate) so I know the amounts, and I have many of my frequent eating patterns shared as MFP meals or recipes. Logging by typing in is really quick IME once that's in place, and it's more consistent accuracy.
I haven’t used the meal scanning option, but I just wanted to chime in re the salmon (you might already know this). Salmon has a lot of variation in its fat content and calories, depending on whether it’s wild or farmed and where it’s from. My salmon this week was from a different shop to last week’s, and this week’s nutritional info shows 1/3 more calories. I think it’s probably the food with the highest variation - aside from different joints of meat (I.e. skinless chicken breast vs skin-on chicken thighs).
I have no idea how the meal scanning option would account for that!
I tried to use it several times but nothing ever comes up. 😏
I love the meal scan option but you have to go back in and adjust your servings size. I use the barcode scanner more often then not, if its a prepackaged item like egg whites or precooked chicken of it has that option.
I only resort to the scanning feature when eating at restaurant that does not post the calories.
