alt Hacker NewsThis won't be useful for you because you share food with others, but for people who do not share food and are interested in long term tracking rather than short term (e.g., they want to take off some weight at a healthy rate and keep it off, as opposed to people who just want to lose a few pounds rapidly for their class reunion and will make no effort after that to keep it off) there is a simple trick that can make it a lot easier.
That trick is to focus on months instead of days. Then count your calories when you buy the food instead of when you eat it. For example lets say you buy a loaf of bread. It is 100 calories per slice and there are 17 slices. Add 1700 to your calorie count for the month.
At the end of the month you can approximate your average daily calories as the amount of calories you bought that month divided by the number of days.
Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out. If you want you can smooth that out a bit by logically splitting those items when they have a lot of calories.
For example consider jar of mayonnaise that might last a few months and is 8000 calories. Instead of counting all 8000 in the month you buy it you can count it as 2000 that month and 2000 more each of the next 3 months.
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I founded a startup based on this idea. Track purchases with credit cards and sum things up on a monthly basis. Unfortunately couldn't find a grocer to take me up on it mid pandemic, but I want to try it again in a few years if no one has made it work yet.
A jar of mayonnaise?? you can measure by the spoonful (or better, by weight, since its nutritional value is in the package) whenever you eat.
A month is a long time and the measurement error will accumulate every day, especially with fats. Not so much problem if you do that with cucumber or spinach.
I did this for a few weeks when I was maintaining weight and did MyFitnessPal for a couple weeks a few years later and got pretty much the same calorie count each time. Very effective.
Even simpler if just looking after oneself: keep the receipts, make the accounting YEARLY.
I have a whole food, plant-based diet and I cook all my own food. I don't buy any processed food, anything with anything animal in it, refined sugar, refined oils (except olive oil for the air fryer), refined carbohydrates, things preserved with salt/vinegar/oil or any stimulants. For B12 I eat Marmite (UK). Most of what I eat is that rare thing: fresh vegetables.
Because I eat almost everything (sometimes there are bad apples), I throw very little away and that includes packaging too, where I am surprised at how little that amounts to. I have a small box for recycling and I only have to empty it ever two to three months.
I could cheat and not keep the receipt on a huge box of chocolates, beer and biscuits but I would only be fooling myself.
As for bread, I just buy flour and yeast, to put it in the breadmaking machine. I buy wholemeal flour which is white flour with some of the stripped off parts of the wheat thrown back in. I am happy with that compromise as it makes a very nice loaf.
Apart from Marmite, nothing I buy has much of an ingredients label, a cauliflower is a cauliflower and has no ingredients.
The receipts are my way of accounting, I could look at them all for the last year and buy everything I need that is shelf-stable for the year ahead.
Mayonnaise used to be something I did eat a lot of, but now that is on the banned list, and I have no idea why I would ever want to eat that stuff nowadays.
I eat to satiety and beyond, my physical activity consists of walking/cycling and I am fitter than I have ever been with a digestive tract that is rock solid. Bloating, constipation or the runs are alien conditions to me, I also get a 'long range bladder' into the deal.
I don't count calories, my goal is to get as many as possible from just vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, grains and fruit. I love cooking and my 'self care' routine. Since there are seasons, my food always changes, right now spring greens are floating my boat.
The idea of keeping the receipts is to have all of them with no banned items in them, and also to track my nutrition experiments. At the moment I am trying to do a year long streak of 'an apple a day' to see what that is about.
Regarding counting macronutrients, why bother? Nobody counts fibre, which is crucial for the lower gut, with protein we eat 2x in the West and nobody is counting phytochemicals in plants beyond the 'five a day' thing. With the exception of bread, everything I eat counts towards the 'five a day' so I am probably on twenty portions of fruit or veg a day, not that I am counting.
I don't mind people wanting to diet to fit into a dress for a special event, that is something that works for them, albeit with yoyoing. I want to be at my fittest during the summer months, to go cycling, and, during winter, I don't care. In this way I am embracing yoyoing, however, my weight does not go up over winter, I just lose some muscle, to get it back again during spring.
>Some things you buy in a month might last into the next month. That will introduce some variation but over longer periods it should cancel out.
Alternately: you can note the day you first and last ate from the container.
Or what I used to do: make tally marks on the container to figure out how many portions it typically provides; then, going forward, count a "standard" portion of that food accordingly.