When Creating a Meal, do I put in the whole recipe?

[AmyL62]

I'm still trying to figure out the 'Create A Meal' process. Do I put in all the in gredients for the meal for my entire family? How do I indicate the 'portion' that I ate. The other day Fitbit thought I'd eaten 400 calories of EVOO!!

TIA--

Amy.

[Cycled]

Dear Amy,

I went through all the same frustrations (and more) than you have and finally decided to scrap so-called calorie counting and food databases entirely.  I finally realized the time and futility of "tracking" in this way was taking away from time better spent being active.

Now - for Food tracking - I only use "GO - Meal and Fitness Tracker" to photo capture what I actually eat and (importantly) WHEN I eat it and associate a Quality color to it.  I was using the Activity side in the GO but I much prefer Fitbit's Steps timeline view.

If you want true accuracy there is nothing more accurate than pictures of what you eat.  If it's inappropriate to take pictures at the time - for example out at a restaurant/party, etc. - I follow up afterward with a Google image or text log of what I ate.

I'm attaching 2 views of how I've married up my GO app food side with Fitbit Steps.  One of them I created from back data in Powerpoint but the other one is a simple screen capture from my iPhone yesterday.

This philosophy - Quality of my food and Timing of my food/activity - works really well for me as I've been at ideal weight for months.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

[ADM]

Hi Amy,  I also experienced confusion in calculating "meals."  But the trick is to estimate the number of servings for your meal.  So if your meal serves 4, then that 400 calories of EVOO would be approximately 100 calories.  

Frankly, this is one area that needs FitBit's improvement because it doesn't work very well; logging  individual foods seems to work better than meals, but that can be time-consuming when logging leftover portions, thus the benefit of creating a "meal."  However, I've found that the ability to measure the actual value of what you've consumed and compare it to the actual calories burned is the BEST FitBit feature, which has helped me make the smartest choices throughout the day in real time.  

And not withstanding the interesting suggestion of taking a photo of what you've eaten, that approach doesn't necessarily help to select and prepare recipe ingredients with fresh, whole and healthy ingredients - which I believe is the best foundation to improve overall wellness & fitness.  (Yes, I've read The Daniel Plan and loved it!).

Another trick is to utilize recipe calculators if you're using recipes that don't include nutritional info.  I've provided links for 2 sites that help calculate nutritional info for meals or recipes.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/recipe/calculator

http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

Hope this helps,

ADM