Help! adjusting serving sizes, does calorie count automatically change calories?

For custom entered food, I only have the nutrition info on the pkg, does Calorie Count automatically adjust calories and the rest of the nutritional info to reflect that when I enter that I've had more (or less) than the serving size?

Because I have noticed that it does so for foods already in the database.

Custom entered items do not self adjust.  You must adjust the values yourself at the time you log the item, but that will only affect the one log entry.  The item will then revert to the original values you put in.

You can get around this partly by entering custom items for several different serving sizes.  For instance, I like frozen flaxseed waffles and have tagged custom items for both 1 waffle and 2 waffles.  If I want to eat 3 waffles, I enter both items. 

It's a little awkward, and improvements are on the way, but it's going to be some time before this is changed.

Thanks for asking a good question.

Thanks so much for your reply Clairelaine. My boyfriend, Pete and I are using CC to keep better tabs of what we put into our bodies. More of an awareness thing than specifically for diet purposes. We are trying to make better choices in the foods we eat and lose weight along the way. However our biggest problem is portion control. It's easy to think, 'wow, we are eating really healthy food' but ultimately overindulge.

I've been a site member for about a month and have found the site extremely helpful with some very useful tools. I love how the site is pretty thorough. Even though I can think of of few things I'd tweak here and there, but it's certainly just as, if not more, helpful and user-friendly as pay sites like Weight Watchers e-Tools.

= )

Evelyn

I also have a tip for changing the serving size on custom added items.  It takes a more time and effort than clairelaine's tip, but it works well for foods you eat regularly but in very irregular servings.  It also works best for people who weigh their food. 

1) Standardize the nutrition info to a 100 gram serving.  This can be done pretty easily: Divide 100 grams by the listed serving size (for a 28 gram serving, for example, you would divide 100/28=3.57), then multiply that figure by each of the nutritional values for the original serving size to produce nutrition info for a 100 gram serving.  (So, if your 28 gram serving had 1 gram of fat, your 100 gram serving will have 3.57 grams of fat, and so on)

2) Enter the 100 gram serving in the "Add a new food" form and then tag it (I use a special '100g' tag for these items so they are easy to find).

3) To use your custom item with a new serving size, just add the tagged item but select the "Values per 100g" button and then enter the custom number of grams in the "Weight" field.  CC will do all the rest of the math for you.

As you can see, there is a little time investment the first time you enter a food, but once you have a 100g tag it is very quick to add a precise quantity.

I've been at this for 2 days now.

For what it's worth, this is the single most inconvenient part of food tracking.

Being able to change the amount of custom entered food that I eat would be the single biggest boost for usability for me.

I hear you about the waffles.  That's what I've been doing on some items, but really, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops when we want to eat 1 waffle versus 2 waffles versus 3 waffles.  Dieting is hard enough.  Keeping a food diary makes it even more painful.

I wanted some crackers today.  I had previously entered the crackers with a serving size of 1, which is 14 crackers.   Today I wanted 7 crackers for a snack.   Faced with the option of either eating all 14 crackers or eating 7 crackers and re-entering the crackers with a serving size of 0.5, I ate all 14 crackers.

I realize I could've eaten 7 and entered 14.  But I have an unhealthy obsession with food.  If I didn't, I wouldn't be here.   ;-)

Anyway, I just wanted to chime in and say this is probably the thing I'd like to see change the most.