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I find that the hardest thing about logging what I eat is knowing what I eat, and what calories those things contain. Often I eat lunch at work where they serve

by flexd 7y ago

I find that the hardest thing about logging what I eat is knowing what I eat, and what calories those things contain. Often I eat lunch at work where they serve a ton of different dishes, and I dont have the opportunity to weigh what I eat, and I have no idea what exactly they put in that said that day. If I try to err on the side of caution, I'll be super hungry because the number of calories I ate does not add up to the number logged. Unless I have the time to make all my food and measure it or only eat processed/pre-made food that is labeled it's hard to keep accurate track. Do any of you feel the same way? I have used Myfitnesspal and similar before, but have never stuck with it. Before I have stayed reasonably fit because I usually ride mountain bikes a lot,but the past few years there has been less riding and I'm now +10kg my normal weight at least.

silviogutierrez 7y ago
Honestly, as someone who values efficiency, I found MyFitnessPal way too slow and clunky. A food tracker should get out of the way. Otherwise you'll - in the heat of the moment - decide not to log things. It also lacked flexibility for those times you dine out, skip meals, or skip logging. Which leads nicely to the shameless plug for https://www.joyapp.com https://www.joyapp.com . Built it for myself, then it spread through forums and has quite a few users. Benefits: - Once you learn the ropes, it's an order of magnitude faster to add entries. It was designed to be opened for as little as possible each day. - If you make it hard to log your food, you won't do it. This makes it trivial. - Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases. All the food is either from a professionally curated database (Nutritionix) or custom foods you enter. - No ads whatsoever. And we don't sell your data. Privacy is very important to us.
- moneywoes 7y ago
  Way too pricy for what you offer.
  - cadwag 7y ago
    I understand that $2 / month is not trivial for everyone, but this criticism alone is simply not helpful. If a person, such as yourself, does not value the benefits the service provides as greater than the price, they are simply not his/her target market. Your argument could be that the price asked would limit his/her market needlessly by simply being too high, but at this price point I doubt that to be the case. He / she built a service with a clear value prop (fastest food logging possible, backed by high quality / custom data, with a privacy focus). For those interested in food logging without having their eating and nutrition habits / data sold off, I doubt the price would be a deterrent. Maybe you can say the service is not meeting expectations in some way. That’s fair, but then please provide more specific feedback. Given the nature of this forum, let’s try to be either more supportive or at least more clear about what could be improved. Drive-by negativity is just not helpful to anyone. I, for one, applaud his/her efforts, find the offering enticing and the price to be very reasonable (Probably too low, in reality) given the attention to detail, data provided, and problem being solved. Disclaimer: I have not used the service and have no association, only browsed the site. I rarely comment, but wanted to balance out this low-effort negativity.
    - silviogutierrez 7y ago
      Thanks for the reasonable take! I think payment ensures a few things: - Makes the business sustainable. You know we'll be around because we have a "revenue > costs" model. - It switches the incentives from "the customer is the product" to "the product is the product". You know how we make money.
  - sidlls 7y ago
    $2/mo is absolutely trivial for the market that this app will target.
  - tomasdore 7y ago
    Username checks out!
- flexd 7y ago
  I'll try it out!
- flocial 7y ago
  "Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases." For me this is the only thing keeping me on MFP (also I don't live in the US so it's a big time saver). The barcode scanner is a godsend. There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the stagnation of MFP though, I think with the right value proposition they're ripe for displacement.
  - silviogutierrez 7y ago
    I will add it, if I figure out the proper way to rank entries. That is, make it clear what's community-entered but peer-reviewed in some way. Right now, MFP is a Wild West in the regard. Oh and to be clear: Joy does have a barcode scanner. It picks up 99% of foods out there.
    - flocial 7y ago
      "Oh and to be clear: Joy does have a barcode scanner. It picks up 99% of foods out there." That's nice to know (I looked for the info but couldn't find it mentioned on the landing or iOS app page). The community entries are a mess. Spelling mistakes abound, sometimes the nutrition profile gets changed by the manufacturer, and barcodes get re-used. But it still covers most of my needs.
  - acemarke 7y ago
    I'd used MFP years ago for a bit, then stopped. I just tried to get back into tracking my meals about a month ago, and tried out an app called LoseIt (Android: com.fitnow.loseit ). I compared them by entering the same meals into both for about a week, and decided to switch to LoseIt, mostly due to the food search feeling snappier and the presentation of the stats looking nicer. Also, LoseIt made it easier to re-enter meals that I'd had recently.
    - silviogutierrez 7y ago
      Redux Royalty in the flesh! Your articles and tutorials were helpful in building Joy. Fun fact: it uses Redux heavily, with TypeScript. Your posts a few years ago in /r/reactjs/ and your site were instrumental. Different username on Reddit, but I'm sure you can find me. Many thanks. [1] [1] Even if you use a competitor!
- rubidium 7y ago
  I’ve been using the free version of Lose It and it works amazing. Any major differences?
  - jpster 7y ago
    I second this. I find it easier & quicker to use than MFP.
chaoxu 7y ago
Totally agree. I tried a few ways and eventually giving up. I just have to live with not having accurate counts. 1. I try to make my own food using common ingredients. It failed in a couple of weeks because I do prefer to not spend that much time on making food. 2. Eating at restaurants is especially difficult. Even if you bring a scale with you. Like if you are given some Chinese dish where all the things are mixed together. I give up and go with "Chinese buffet" option in myfitnesspal. 3. Ironically, fast food places do have calories listed, and that justifies some of my visits...
groby_b 7y ago
After doing it for a while, you get a rough feeling for the calories involved - you can tell just by looking at your dish if it's 500 or 1,000 calories. That means you don't get high precision data, and the nutrients may be off, but it's more than enough to keep yourself in a caloric deficit/surplus as you choose. (Also, don't eat lunch at work if you can avoid it. It's greasy, over-salted, and not the best food for you. No matter what corporate propaganda tells you)
- tootie 7y ago
  I tried this for a while. I was hitting the gym for HIIT and weights and counting calories with MyFitnessPal. I estimated a pretty huge calorie deficit and it felt like it (felt woozy more than once). Lost zero pounds. After that I stopped being so careful with counting and just tried to eat right and keep exercising. Lost zero pounds. I wanted to get some hormone levels tested but my doctor said not too.
  - brogrammernot 7y ago
    See a new doctor. Getting blood work is super important and can help pinpoint if you’ve got something else going on. When dieting it’s also important to weigh yourself once a week, ideally in the morning about 20-30 minutes after you wake up. You may not lose weight your first 2-3 weeks on a caloric deficit as your body adjusts. Coming back to the bloodwork, you should get a full panel at least 1x/year if not twice a year. I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to do so, but most of the time insurances cover a large portion of it as preventative care. Blood work can show if you’re out of range on items like your test/estrogen levels, thyroid function & many more areas. If your current doctor doesn’t support that, I’m sorry but that’s not a great doctor. Blood work is important.
    - gjs278 7y ago
      blood work would not clear up why this guy isn’t losing weight. he’s just not sticking with the diet long enough and not actually eating a deficit.
  - 7y ago
brandonmenc 7y ago
You MUST use a food scale and weigh ALL of your food. Don't use measuring cups, and don't eyeball it. Also, don't trust any calorie counts from a restaurant. After a while you get better at not needing a food scale for absolutely everything, but I've been controlling my weight (both gaining and losing) via CICO for nearly two decades and I still weigh most of my food.
- bobsil1 7y ago
  If you eat high veggies / protein and low carb / fat, you can mostly just rely on appetite.
flocial 7y ago
What works for me is continuous tracking. As long as you continuously track weight, body weight, activity (fitness monitors or the pedometer on your phone), and calories you will be able to make corrections based on the output (basically body weight with some corrections based on what you see in the mirror if you lift weights or exercise regularly). Even if your calorie estimations are off eventually for the day, it will show up in your body weight so you just adjust your estimates based on that to develop your "feel". Buying a food scale and cooking your own food really gives you a good feel for the calories involved with various ingredients. After a few cycles of calibration you will get a better at it and it will be less of a burden.
kshacker 7y ago
I used lose it. I will go back to it but I haven't used it for a few months. What worked for me was logging on the table, as soon as I got the food. Once I started deferring it, ok I will log it later at end of day, I started slipping. The reason for deferral was similar to yours: I want to go more fine grained and be accurate, but no: you are deferring it and eventually I will get into a state where I miss a day or 3 and now no way to go back and fix. So the next time I start (touch wood), enter as you grab the food.
giaour 7y ago
I always found that calorie counting is much easier if you primarily eat packaged and/or prepared foods. Popular apps and websites already know the nutritional info for what you're eating, so it can be as easy as searching by brand name or UPC. If you do a lot of cooking and baking yourself, counting calories is a painful process. You have to weigh everything going into the recipe, understand how cooking processes alter the nutritional makeup of your ingredients, calculate the probable calorie count of the finished product, and then weigh each portion while it's being served. If you like to use specialty ingredients (e.g., different kinds of grain flours in a single recipe or fermented vegetables in Sichuanese cuisine), even figuring out the calorie values of your inputs can be challenging.
downerending 7y ago
My trick is to look carefully at the food I'm about to eat, and consider how good/filling/satisfying/etc it looks compared to a known benchmark (e.g., a McDonalds cheeseburger). Estimating that way, I'm usually within 20%, which is plenty close (esp given that unbiased errors cancel out). Beyond that, weigh every day, track values in a decaying average app to cancel out noise, and greatly reduce or fast completely on days where I'm over my line. Easier said than done, of course, but I'm halfway successful.

by flexd 7y ago

silviogutierrez 7y ago

Honestly, as someone who values efficiency, I found MyFitnessPal way too slow and clunky. A food tracker should get out of the way. Otherwise you'll - in the heat of the moment - decide not to log things. It also lacked flexibility for those times you dine out, skip meals, or skip logging. Which leads nicely to the shameless plug for https://www.joyapp.com https://www.joyapp.com . Built it for myself, then it spread through forums and has quite a few users. Benefits: - Once you learn the ropes, it's an order of magnitude faster to add entries. It was designed to be opened for as little as possible each day. - If you make it hard to log your food, you won't do it. This makes it trivial. - Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases. All the food is either from a professionally curated database (Nutritionix) or custom foods you enter. - No ads whatsoever. And we don't sell your data. Privacy is very important to us.

moneywoes 7y ago
Way too pricy for what you offer.
- cadwag 7y ago
  I understand that $2 / month is not trivial for everyone, but this criticism alone is simply not helpful. If a person, such as yourself, does not value the benefits the service provides as greater than the price, they are simply not his/her target market. Your argument could be that the price asked would limit his/her market needlessly by simply being too high, but at this price point I doubt that to be the case. He / she built a service with a clear value prop (fastest food logging possible, backed by high quality / custom data, with a privacy focus). For those interested in food logging without having their eating and nutrition habits / data sold off, I doubt the price would be a deterrent. Maybe you can say the service is not meeting expectations in some way. That’s fair, but then please provide more specific feedback. Given the nature of this forum, let’s try to be either more supportive or at least more clear about what could be improved. Drive-by negativity is just not helpful to anyone. I, for one, applaud his/her efforts, find the offering enticing and the price to be very reasonable (Probably too low, in reality) given the attention to detail, data provided, and problem being solved. Disclaimer: I have not used the service and have no association, only browsed the site. I rarely comment, but wanted to balance out this low-effort negativity.
  - silviogutierrez 7y ago
    Thanks for the reasonable take! I think payment ensures a few things: - Makes the business sustainable. You know we'll be around because we have a "revenue > costs" model. - It switches the incentives from "the customer is the product" to "the product is the product". You know how we make money.
- sidlls 7y ago
  $2/mo is absolutely trivial for the market that this app will target.
- tomasdore 7y ago
  Username checks out!
flexd 7y ago
I'll try it out!
flocial 7y ago
"Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases." For me this is the only thing keeping me on MFP (also I don't live in the US so it's a big time saver). The barcode scanner is a godsend. There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the stagnation of MFP though, I think with the right value proposition they're ripe for displacement.
- silviogutierrez 7y ago
  I will add it, if I figure out the proper way to rank entries. That is, make it clear what's community-entered but peer-reviewed in some way. Right now, MFP is a Wild West in the regard. Oh and to be clear: Joy does have a barcode scanner. It picks up 99% of foods out there.
  - flocial 7y ago
    "Oh and to be clear: Joy does have a barcode scanner. It picks up 99% of foods out there." That's nice to know (I looked for the info but couldn't find it mentioned on the landing or iOS app page). The community entries are a mess. Spelling mistakes abound, sometimes the nutrition profile gets changed by the manufacturer, and barcodes get re-used. But it still covers most of my needs.
- acemarke 7y ago
  I'd used MFP years ago for a bit, then stopped. I just tried to get back into tracking my meals about a month ago, and tried out an app called LoseIt (Android: com.fitnow.loseit ). I compared them by entering the same meals into both for about a week, and decided to switch to LoseIt, mostly due to the food search feeling snappier and the presentation of the stats looking nicer. Also, LoseIt made it easier to re-enter meals that I'd had recently.
  - silviogutierrez 7y ago
    Redux Royalty in the flesh! Your articles and tutorials were helpful in building Joy. Fun fact: it uses Redux heavily, with TypeScript. Your posts a few years ago in /r/reactjs/ and your site were instrumental. Different username on Reddit, but I'm sure you can find me. Many thanks. [1] [1] Even if you use a competitor!
rubidium 7y ago
I’ve been using the free version of Lose It and it works amazing. Any major differences?
- jpster 7y ago
  I second this. I find it easier & quicker to use than MFP.

chaoxu 7y ago

Totally agree. I tried a few ways and eventually giving up. I just have to live with not having accurate counts. 1. I try to make my own food using common ingredients. It failed in a couple of weeks because I do prefer to not spend that much time on making food. 2. Eating at restaurants is especially difficult. Even if you bring a scale with you. Like if you are given some Chinese dish where all the things are mixed together. I give up and go with "Chinese buffet" option in myfitnesspal. 3. Ironically, fast food places do have calories listed, and that justifies some of my visits...

groby_b 7y ago

After doing it for a while, you get a rough feeling for the calories involved - you can tell just by looking at your dish if it's 500 or 1,000 calories. That means you don't get high precision data, and the nutrients may be off, but it's more than enough to keep yourself in a caloric deficit/surplus as you choose. (Also, don't eat lunch at work if you can avoid it. It's greasy, over-salted, and not the best food for you. No matter what corporate propaganda tells you)

tootie 7y ago
I tried this for a while. I was hitting the gym for HIIT and weights and counting calories with MyFitnessPal. I estimated a pretty huge calorie deficit and it felt like it (felt woozy more than once). Lost zero pounds. After that I stopped being so careful with counting and just tried to eat right and keep exercising. Lost zero pounds. I wanted to get some hormone levels tested but my doctor said not too.
- brogrammernot 7y ago
  See a new doctor. Getting blood work is super important and can help pinpoint if you’ve got something else going on. When dieting it’s also important to weigh yourself once a week, ideally in the morning about 20-30 minutes after you wake up. You may not lose weight your first 2-3 weeks on a caloric deficit as your body adjusts. Coming back to the bloodwork, you should get a full panel at least 1x/year if not twice a year. I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to do so, but most of the time insurances cover a large portion of it as preventative care. Blood work can show if you’re out of range on items like your test/estrogen levels, thyroid function & many more areas. If your current doctor doesn’t support that, I’m sorry but that’s not a great doctor. Blood work is important.
  - gjs278 7y ago
    blood work would not clear up why this guy isn’t losing weight. he’s just not sticking with the diet long enough and not actually eating a deficit.
- 7y ago

brandonmenc 7y ago

You MUST use a food scale and weigh ALL of your food. Don't use measuring cups, and don't eyeball it. Also, don't trust any calorie counts from a restaurant. After a while you get better at not needing a food scale for absolutely everything, but I've been controlling my weight (both gaining and losing) via CICO for nearly two decades and I still weigh most of my food.

bobsil1 7y ago
If you eat high veggies / protein and low carb / fat, you can mostly just rely on appetite.

flocial 7y ago

What works for me is continuous tracking. As long as you continuously track weight, body weight, activity (fitness monitors or the pedometer on your phone), and calories you will be able to make corrections based on the output (basically body weight with some corrections based on what you see in the mirror if you lift weights or exercise regularly). Even if your calorie estimations are off eventually for the day, it will show up in your body weight so you just adjust your estimates based on that to develop your "feel". Buying a food scale and cooking your own food really gives you a good feel for the calories involved with various ingredients. After a few cycles of calibration you will get a better at it and it will be less of a burden.

kshacker 7y ago

I used lose it. I will go back to it but I haven't used it for a few months. What worked for me was logging on the table, as soon as I got the food. Once I started deferring it, ok I will log it later at end of day, I started slipping. The reason for deferral was similar to yours: I want to go more fine grained and be accurate, but no: you are deferring it and eventually I will get into a state where I miss a day or 3 and now no way to go back and fix. So the next time I start (touch wood), enter as you grab the food.

giaour 7y ago

I always found that calorie counting is much easier if you primarily eat packaged and/or prepared foods. Popular apps and websites already know the nutritional info for what you're eating, so it can be as easy as searching by brand name or UPC. If you do a lot of cooking and baking yourself, counting calories is a painful process. You have to weigh everything going into the recipe, understand how cooking processes alter the nutritional makeup of your ingredients, calculate the probable calorie count of the finished product, and then weigh each portion while it's being served. If you like to use specialty ingredients (e.g., different kinds of grain flours in a single recipe or fermented vegetables in Sichuanese cuisine), even figuring out the calorie values of your inputs can be challenging.

downerending 7y ago

My trick is to look carefully at the food I'm about to eat, and consider how good/filling/satisfying/etc it looks compared to a known benchmark (e.g., a McDonalds cheeseburger). Estimating that way, I'm usually within 20%, which is plenty close (esp given that unbiased errors cancel out). Beyond that, weigh every day, track values in a decaying average app to cancel out noise, and greatly reduce or fast completely on days where I'm over my line. Easier said than done, of course, but I'm halfway successful.