Getting Started Logging Food

There is a high accuracy/high pain to low accuracy/low pain continuum of logging strategies. 

First, learn what matters–you might be surprised how caloric some items are. Then, lean as high accuracy as you can stand, but don’t worry about going crazy.

Don’t Log the Parsley Flakes


You don’t need to log items with little nutrition. Don’t bother logging water, spices, supplements, etc. Always log high calorie items like oil, butter, sugar, etc.


Prefer Weights, but Volumes are Better than Guessing


Prefer logging by weight using your kitchen scale as highest accuracy. Try grams, use a “weigh boat,” and use “tare tricks” to add and subtract.


Dealing with Missing Foods


Highest accuracy is use the label scanner/manual entry of a label. Always include the big 4 (calories, protein, fat, carbs). You can also carefully pick a very close substitute/proxy.


Groups and Recipes


Unlike other apps, our “groups” can be used like repeated meals or recipes containing other foods, and they can be nested–a supper group of a steak, a slice of a cornbread recipe group, and a tablespoon of a pan sauce recipe group. 


Dealing with (local) Restaurants


At restaurants you have to make 2 big guesses: (1) portions in volume units, and (2) components of recipes. Use the “handy guide” for portions, and “always remember to add the butter” (and nuts, cheese, sugary items) to recipes.
Chain restaurants and grocery stores have facts on file/web!


For estimating portions of ingredients like cheese or butter at the table at a restaurant, you can use a number of heuristics. Here's a simple guide from the University of MN:

Basic Logging Features

Shortcuts 

Eat again - Long press on a food that you have already logged in your food journal brings up the “Eat Again” option

Search - opening search before you add a search term - brings up foods that you have recently eaten in top picks, then previously logged foods containing your search term will show up as "Favorites" once you type something in.

Suggest -  looks at your macros remaining for the day and suggests foods from amongst foods you’ve logged and suggests foods that might satisfy your macros for the day. 

Compound Foods 

You don’t want to have to look up bread, peanut butter and jelly every time you log your PBJ.  We make it easy for you to create compound foods and recipes.

Notice that within the food- not only can you adjust the portion,  you can scan, search or custom add additional foods to create a compound food. Naming the food makes it searchable.  

Recipes

If it's something that you often make many variations of you might also choose to create a recipe to save in your recipe box.  You can also start a food from the recipe box and add it to your journal later.  This is handy if you are planning meals ahead of time or just want to capture a good recipe when you see it.   

If you start from the recipe box to find your food, long press brings up the menu to add to the Food Journal.