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I 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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> 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".

(this tip works with finances too)

You can give yourself an ability akin to time travel by writing things down first.

If I write down the calories afterwards, I get the "oh, I shouldn't have done that" feeling at times. I'd like a little time travel button that takes me back to before I did, and let me adjust my behaviour and run through the situation again. If I write it down first I get to have the "oh, that's not worth it" feeling up front and decide to do something else.

This made a big difference for me, both lowering what I was eating and making me happier about the choices I made.

This is what happened to me when I needed to lose weight. The act of counting calories more or less completely revamped my diet in a positive way.

Turned out I was also stupidly deficient on protein day to day.

Yeah I am doing 1g per lb of lean body weight and let's just say I have been eating a disturbing amount of egg white (I'm a big guy!)

Getting protein in takes dedication & awareness

Isn't Whey powder a traditional "solution" for loading up on protein?

If I take two protein shakes with double servings I am not halfway to my daily goal, but sure it helps! I tend to have protein powder and greek yogurt for breakfast (with peanut butter) and a double serving after the gym. That, with a protein dense lunch and dinner gets me to around 180g protein.

it's less than you'd hope. you need a fairly high volume of protein shake to get more than 40g of it in a sitting, and your target is probably like 100 or more grams of protein a day

I did a daily shake for a while as an after gym recovery food and I still had more calories from carbs than protein. it's just difficult.

Consciouss eating.

One can (and should) extend that concept to anything. Be conscious about what you do. Then you likely know, if you are not doing good - and can change it.

Replace your diet fad with a journaling fad.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtuce

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyeleotris_marmorata

Interesting and valid issue! I assume it's crowdsourced data from a community and just isn't that popular where you are, but good points.

I'm living in San Jose, California, where MyFitnessPal is quite popular --- but being an Asian person I eat a lot of Asian food.

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.

That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.

I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.

Healthy foods are not healthy in an excessive quantity. Diets don't need to be tracked to the individual calorie. We don't burn the same amount l number of calories each day and food labels show an average of the nutritional value. If a person is consistent, they will achieve the desired result; either gaining or losing weight.

I've been tracking consistently for about 5 years. It's feasible.

It works medium term for lots of people. Helped me get visible abs. But I do agree that tracking calories for the rest of my life sounds exhausting.

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)

Yeah I can get that - pre-packaged cooked chicken is easier than roasted rotisserie chicken from the counter even if it's probably worse (loads of additives and flavourings)

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.

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