New member with questions about the food log...

Hello all... 

I am having trouble with the food log, for two reasons.  They both stem from the fact that I work at a small, independent restaurant.  I eat a lot of my food there, and it is all made on site.  This means that when I try to log foods, they don't exist in the database, and it means that I don't know the calorie content of my meals.  What do people do in instances like this? 

The other problem I have is that I get home very late at night, often after midnight.  Last night when I went to log my dinner, it had already changed to today's log.  Do you think I should try to simply use the activity log not including the running around I do at work, and keep track of my foods on my own? 

Thanks for any advice!

Sarah

You can select any date you want when you enter food into your food log.  I change the date all the time when I'm entering new foods after midnight.

Can you get your hands on the recipes or at least a good estimate of what goes into the food you eat?  If so, you can use the recipe builder to figure out the calories.  Just go to "New Recipe" under "Foods," and you can type in the recipe.

Also, if you know how many calories are in your food, you can always enter it manually.

Oh, cool.  I didn't realize I could change the date, thanks! 

And yeah, I think I can at least get a good idea of what goes into the foods, good thought.  Thank you, I'm pretty new to this, so that wouldn't have even occured to me!

I eat mostly home cooked meals with the odd (non-chain) restaurant thrown in.  The food log and recipe analyzer is a little cumbersome to use, but still beats trying to track by hand, and I think I get pretty close.

One big help is to tag recipes/foods that you eat frequently so that you don't have to recreate the wheel.  Maybe chef could give you the "recipes" of the foods you eat most often.  They usually are pretty careful about portioning out meats to keep the food costs in line.

If you invest in a good kitchen scale at home, and weigh everything you can get pretty experienced at figuring out how much a cup of rice or 4 ounces of chicken looks like, and that also helps when you are out and about.

Re whether it is worth it to try and log calories, I def. find it helpful to keeping me on track losing weight.  It helps me control my portions, and sometimes I skip food I don't really need so I don't have the hassle of logging it!

I agree.  Tagging is definitely a life saver.  And I find having my food log online to be really helpful.  I remember in the past trying to keep a food log by writing it down or in a file on my computer, and I never managed to keep it up for very long.  For me, it got annoying.  Plus, I'm a pretty private person when it comes to losing weight.  I didn't like having my food logs lying around for other people to see.  This is better.  It's online, I can access it from anywhere with a computer, and it tallies the calories and all the other nutritional information for me.  Sometimes when I'm trying to decide what I want to eat, I'll check the analysis section to see if I'm low on any nutrients like protein or calcium, and I'll decide what to eat based on that.