GeertH Member

Why place such importance on a streak? You could have a 400 day streak, miss logging in due to circumstances for a short while and have the whole thing reset to 0.

If you log all your food intake in MFP, maybe you can show them the log. Bonus points if it's almost all healthy foods. Then ask 'm what they ate the past days. In the end it's a tricky subject. If it were friends or acquaintances I'd tell them to mind their own business. But in my case it's usually my mom that starts…

I think we're seeing a bit of a divide between the camp of "keep things as accurate as possible" and "just give me convenient serving sizes". One approach is always gonna be awkward for the other group. If you insist on 100 grams for entries then you'll have to check what one serving size actually is and convert. If you…

What I find more useful is weighing every day, record the weight somewhere (I use a Google spreadsheet) and have the average of the measurements calculated every week. Then I can see how it evolves. If the averages go down, I'm losing weight. They go up, I'm gaining. The problem with taking snapshots or looking at daily…

A digital kitchen scale can be used to weigh any food. Weight measurements will be the most accurate for tracking. It is a lot of work and can make cooking a hassle, but after a while it becomes second nature. Plus, the longer you do it, the better you get at estimating the weight of foodstuffs just by looking at them…

The reason "starvation mode" was labeled as a myth is because people incorrectly invoked it for low or moderate caloric restrictions, or misunderstood it. You may have heard things like "the reason I'm not losing weight is because my metabolism slows down", or "I should actually eat more to lose weight" (not kidding about…

"Exactly as stated on the label" has proven to be an issue as well in my experience, for a number of reasons. First, labels can be confusing. They may list a certain serving size but then proceed to give you the values per 100 grams or some other unit, or the other way around. Second, some folks are a bit too literal with…

You can definitely get great use out of MFP and lose a lot of weight using it. And no matter how good a system is, some folks are always gonna use it wrong or in a sub-optimal way. It's just that for those using it right and being accurate it entails more work than it should. Constantly having to be paranoid about entries…

I've wanted to rant too sometime but I figured it wasn't gonna help anyone. After all it feels like attacking people for what they do when it's well-intentioned and they're not always aware of mistakes. So I finally got around to making this post hoping to shed some light. Leading by example will get us further, I hope.

Yups. But I'd wager plenty of people are consuming more brand goods and ready-made meals than whole foods, so USDA would only go so far in being useful for them. I'd like to avoid seeing a discussion of metric vs imperial since that tends to devolve quickly. Weight measurements are in most case more useful than content…

Not everyone would know what those initials are for. If you took a very popular entry from the shared database, adjusted it and added your initials to the food name, it might confuse people who don't know what those initials are doing in the food name or that people even use such a system. They might assume it's the name…

That is certainly useful on an individual basis, but it would benefit the community if incorrect entries are adjusted instead. Adding your initials to an existing entry not by yourself would only be confusing to others (I assume you don't do this).

Good stuff. I put some emphasis on specifics like sodium and total carbs because I see these errors being made over and over, and just seeing these be done better would avoid a large amount of the issues with entries and save time.

True. Right now I'm just hoping to provide a resource for users looking to avoid mistakes and maybe shed some light on the way entries can be incorrect, even without someone knowing. This won't reach everyone, but you've gotta start somewhere and it's better than just looking on and doing nothing. I've also posted this…

In some cases using the serving size on the package is easiest. It's a judgement call. Yet 100 gram entries can still prove very useful. Say for example that you know the values for 100 grams of Snickers. Depending on whether you get a regular bar, some king size or a fun/mini size, you can use that same entry quite easily…

If grams are listed beside it, things become a lot more useful. But keep in mind that things like cups and tablespoons are most often used in the US (and Liberia), but less frequently outside of there. Then there's a difference in how various nations use the measure of "1 cup". See this Wikipedia article for some examples:…