alt Hacker NewsI try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count.
I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.
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These apps also lack stuff besides common American/European dishes. Most of my food is healthy homemade food and entering them is an absolute pain.
Eating homemade stir fried celtuce [1]? Homemade steamed marble goby [2]? Nope, out of luck. They only have nutrition info for packaged mac and cheese.
I think being consistently inaccurate helps. If you always get the same thing at a certain restaurant, you can start by giving your best estimate of the calories in that meal. Then if your average weight doesn't move in the direction you want you can adjust your target calories to compensate.
one unintended side effect i had with myfitnesspal was that i ended up eating more prepackaged/highly-processed foods because i disliked estimating calories in home-cooked stuff so much (especially because i knew it'd be an inaccurate guess)
It takes some effort, but there’s a lot to gain. When I track what I eat and keep my daily calories in check, I feel much better. If I’m unsure of the exact calorie count, I’ll estimate a bit higher - around 1.2x.
I found it to be useless for my cooking style. I imagine if your meals were a chicken breast, a single veggie, and a single starch it's useful. However, I tend to do stir fries with lots of different veggies, spices, oils, etc... It was extremely difficult and even more cumbersome to try and enter those meals into that.
I've used it on and off for 7 or 8 years and it's the only thing that can consistently help me lose weight. Even just the mindfulness of knowing how much you're eating and how much you're exercising are helpful in the process. You don't have to be that accurate on exact calorie counts for this to work.
Lean into that
And even if you don't record with 100pc accuracy, there's still a lot of value
That's part of why there's such a push for better methodologies
Yeah, I have tried a few times to keep track via Cronometer but I can never keep it up. Eating out is the killer, as you say. I find I often don't even have a frame of reference for estimating the amount of calories. With the amount of sauces and oil that go into a lot of stuff, I feel like a lot of things could as easily be 1,200 calories as 500 calories.
Yeah the best option is to meal plan and follow the plan vs letting your mind make on-the-fly decisions. But ofc, that isn't always feasible.
> Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count
This is why one of the best ways to lose weight is to just keep a food diary / count calories. You don't need any special / fad diet, just the act of trying to keep a note of everything you eat will cause you to stop and think, "I don't need to eat this".