Ask HN: How and when do you log your food?

[aismail]

Hi HN,

I'm a quantified self geek. I have been logging my food for 7 months now (almost daily), and I would like to hear more about your experience doing that.

How are you logging the food? When do you log your food? How do you manage through weekends or vacations? What about estimating the quantity of food?

[auganov]

I'd use cronometer.com everyday and try to always get the calorie counts right (didn't care so much about other metrics). My margin of error was around 50 calories/day (figured out by comparing with expected weight loss). The thing is after around 2 months I developed a fairly good intuition and just didn't need to use the software anymore.

[aismail]

I personally use MyFitnessPal + some techniques to do food logging and get the calories burned from BodyMedia. How do you get your own calories burned?

[auganov]

I don't exercise, slightly adjusted BMR x 1.2 pretty much worked.

[aismail]

So you prefer not to exercise to eating more and exercising?

[auganov]

It's kind of hard (if you're not into exercise) to burn more than 400 daily. So given that I burn ~1580/day by default an extra 300 is not such a big incentive to exercise. It's just an extra small meal/snack.

[aismail]

Using http://www.myfitnesspal.com/tools/bmr-calculator, it seems that "by default I burn around" 1.9kcal per day. However I've found it quite easy to hack 700 of them into a day just by exercising for 10 minutes and having more walking meetings. In your case, do you consider walking exercising?

[jordsmi]

I use myfitnesspal to log food.

Lately I haven't been logging as much since I just eat between the same 2-3 things everyday.

I usually log my day again if I eat something new.

For estimating food I weighed things out in the beginning and how I just eyeball it to be the same amount.

[aismail]

Which moment of the day do you use to log your food(s)? How did you learn to eyeball your food?

[jordsmi]

When I log, I log before/during cooking of the meal. I'll usually plan my meal on myfitnesspal so I know what all to make so that it fits my macros.

And for eyeballing after making the same things over and over and weighing them out, you start to get a feel for how much it is you need. Every once and awhile I'll weigh out what I eyeballed to make sure I'm not going too low or high.

[MalcolmDiggs]

My Samsung phone came with some "S Health" software preinstalled. Has a pedometer, an exercise tracker and a food log. Not the most complete food database, but seems to work fine.

I used to use mypyramidtracker but I'm not sure if that exists anymore.

[aismail]

Apparently that one was replaced by https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/default.aspx. So what is your daily routine around that? When do you log your food?

[MalcolmDiggs]

As far as routine: When I was serious about calorie counting I carried a small notepad (about the size of an index card) and pen in my back pocket at all times. I'd jot down every single thing I ate, right when I ate it (or else I'd forget).

When I'd get home for the day, after I had my last meal I'd pull out my notepad, go to the tracker and tediously enter everything. Just once a day. This worked for me because I snacked a lot, and pulling out the laptop/phone for every single snack just seemed ridiculous. But the notepad was easy and nobody seemed to notice.

[aismail]

Very interesting! I've noticed that some people can just "keep it in their head" (including snacks) for 1-2 days. I guess their memory is much better than ours, heh! I enter it immediately after eating as well. But I use the mobile phone since I don't snack that much.

Why did you care about other people noticing the notebook?

[FlopV]

I pick a macro plan (protein/fat/carbs), then eat according to my macros for each meal. So I set them prior, then just count them via the labels.

[aismail]

What do you do when labels are not available? (e.g. eating out)