How To Food Journal?

[ttubbs]

I'm not a regular here on the HL forum, and in fact this may be my first post here. I did a search on 'food journal' and then just simply 'journal', but didn't find what I was looking for, though I would bet it's here someplace.

For fun (sort of), and maybe to drop a final 10lbs. that won't budge, I thought I'd try to keep a log of my food consumption. I've been given this advice, and have read that this is a good idea several times. EW has another sales pitch for there diet plan in my latest issue, and this is one of the big steps in their plan. I've had a fitday.com account for a while that I've just tinkered with, and thought I'd start there. I now remember why I've never done anything with it.

Q. How do you record non-labeled food?

That is my question, and why this journal idea fails for me. For example, this morning I stopped at my friendly neighborhood cafe and picked up a veggie omelet and a regular Mountain Dew. The MD makes it clear that 20oz. contains 290 empty (though far from meaningless :D) calories. All I know about the omelet is that it had veggies, cheese, and supposedly no trans fat (according to a big sign stating none is used in the cafe at all).

So, what do you do? Fitday didn't seem to offer anything I felt was even a close approximation. I stopped off at CalorieKing after snooping around here, and, after a food search there, they have a section titled 'Average of All' that my be a promising estimate. I couldn't find a deffinition of what the 'Average of All' means, but assume it is an average of all omelets in their database. Anyone know how that works? Do you think that would be an OK way to estimate? I think they had a 1 egg, 1/2 oz cheese, and 1 tsp fat average item. Omelets are typically 3 egg I think, so I could multiply that by 3.

So, if you journal, I'm interested in ideas for dealing with these non-labeled foods? Without a way to do this, the log is not a practical idea/tool for me.

What do you think of using CalorieKing (or something similar) to estimate by? If it seems a reasonable idea, how trustworthy do you consider their 'Average of All' items list?

TIA

[Robyn1007]

Hi Ty,

I think food journaling is a great tool to use to track what you are eating but also to help you not eat things like an unlabeled and likely laden with fat and calories items from a convenience store. You can estimate like you said but it's probably not a great way to journal. I use (as do a bunch of us here, we have a group over there that I'd be happy to invite you to if you're interested) www.sparkpeople.com. Part of journaling is that it makes you more aware of the things you put in your body and make choices based on your knowledge of what is in it OR your lack of knowledge.

Also, in estimating the average fast food omelet, I'd guess 3 eggs, 2 tsp butter, and 2 oz of cheese (remember, fast food isn't about watching the fat, they make it so it tastes good) putting you at over 600 calories for the omelet alone making your breakfast around 900 calories. That's almost my entire days worth of calories on my plan 1200-1550. So, while journaling is good, if you don't use it to make adjustments to your diet it won't help. I always over estimate any items eaten out that I can't get nutritional info on.

Good luck, it's a hard battle which I haven't won but little by little am learning the tools to do it.

[ttubbs]

Thanks for the info. and the invite offer to sparkpeople (as it's a free site, I'm guessing you have a private group setup there?). I'm not sure I'm purposeful enough as far as fitness goes to take you up on that just yet. If you told me you discussed fitness specifically for playing better golf, then my arm would be twisted.

It sounds as if you are suggesting journaling works best when I take the time and spend the energy to plan and prepare my own food. I've been working on this for what seems like forever. I'm probably a 50/50, on-again, off-again, both breakfast and lunch , brown-bagger. I'm convinced the sole reason for being off-again is the boring factor.

After a couple of stabs at estimating, I figured close to 600 calories for the omelet as well. So, I'm not surprised by your numbers, but it is sort of a WOW!

[Robyn1007]

Sparkpeople does have a golf team (and you can be part of multiple teams). :D

[potato_moose]

When I journal I always do it on a free on-line site, sometimes checking w/ Calorie King or other websites for confirmation of a number. I try to find a few examples of what I've eaten and then average them. I figure if I overestimate how many calories I ate on one day, there will certainly be another day when I underestimate, so I don't try to be too anal about it. I would definitely err on the high end if what I had eaten was restaurant food--fast food or any other.

This is probably more trouble than you want to go to, but I also bought Mastercook so I could put our recipes through it and get the calorie count per serving of the food we cook at home. It's a pain, and you have to be really careful to get an accurate count, but for me it was really helpful in losing 20 pounds.

[DmOrtega]

Here's a good site for restaraunts and brand name foods.

http://www.dietfacts.com/

It is really eye opening to see what goes into many of the prepare foods. Reading labels whenever possible gives us most of the information that we need to make an informed choice but buying at a restaraunt or convienence store is much more difficult.

[ttubbs]

Thanks all. Not really the info I wanted, but not surprised by it either. Preping my own food consistently does not come easy for me. This is one area I wish I could really buy convenience, as in convenience that doesn't flush good nutrition down the toilet.

If you must prepare your own food, I can see how MasterCook would be a great help with tracking the facts. I've not used it for that purpose (yet), but have been tempted to many times.

I created an account at SparkPeople so I can play around with that.

Thanks again,
TT

[LakeMartinGal]

I'm not sure if this is what you wanted to hear, but I use CalorieKing on my PDA, and found it very easy to add the items under "my foods" that are not in the database. Average all brands is probably just what you thought...;) I find that just keeping track at the time of eating (or before) helps me keep my eating in line.


Another way to estimate the food value in non-labelled items is to do a search on the item... ie. "3 egg omelet nutritional information." Somewhere online, someone has estimated the values for it, if you can't look at the ingredients item by item...

[ttubbs]

Yes, that's more like what I was hoping to be able to do.

I've created myself a sparkpeople account, and so far really like it. I'm analytical by nature, and really like how you can customize and track just about any nutritional component you like. Only have a couple of days worth of entries, but I think I'll be able to estimate without too much effort. I'm not sure I'll need to do it for long, because seeing the actual numbers is a real motivator to prep my own stuff anyway.

TT