why is there not a category for home made food? I do not eat out ever

[Kit60]

I am new to the fitbit, but cannot seem to track my calories , as I cook and eat at home 95% of the time, putting in Green Salad for example comes up with carbs and sodium?? why because the only option is to pick a salad from a fast food resturant?

[Lou_Zhills]

I rarely eat out. Once in a while we'll go somewhere, and then I always remember why we eat at home. Too expensive, too much MSG, too much everything bad and not enough good. And then I feel like crap for a couple of days while my body tries to get clean again. Just not worth it. 

What I did was create my own meals and foods to log. On the Food page, there is a section for Favorites. I figured out the calories and nutritional values of various items I prepare by looking up the ingredients individually. You can get some of it off the packaging, and the rest of it you just have to Google. When I have the values for all the ingredients, I tally it as a recipe, break it down to a serving size, and put it in Favorites using the Create a Food button. Then the next time I have that food, I can just click on it. Eventually you will have a database of most of the foods you prepare.

The other thing I have done is combine some of these foods into a meal. There are some meals that we have exactly the same every time. For instance, over in Favorite Foods, I already have my toast (includes bread, butter, jam), eggs (includes butter), coffee (includes creamer).  So then I use Create a Meal to combine those foods and call it Scrambled Egg Breakfast.

This is pretty laborious and kind of a pain to figure out all the food values initially, but worth it eventually.  Once I did, it got a whole lot easier to log home cooking. If anyone can figure out an easier way to do, I'd love to hear it.

Good luck to you.

Lou  

[trainer]

There is an app called My Fitness Pal (it is also a website so you can look it up on your computer first) that links very well to fitbit and has a MUCH better food data base. What I have done is taken the homemade recipes I make and laboriously entered them into fitbit. It is very labor intensive, but I make these dishes the same way every time (homemade bean soup for example) so now that I have them entered I can access them through fitbit easily using the names I've given them. As for something like salad. I start with my base of mixed greens (which I just call ''lettuce" because I'm not going to quibble over is it arugala or spinach or kale or...) and then add veggies which change all the time. I try to remember three of the veggies and just log them as 'raw broccoli' or 'raw tomato', etc. and I don't worry about the miniscule amount of chopped onion or handful of peas I put on. It is definitely labor intensive but I'm used to it by now.

[Nosrepmodnar]

I created My Foods, have standard salad, where I calculated the calories i my standard salad plus dressing.

Have My Oatmeal and Wife's oatmeal since we put different stuff in there.

I found it rather hard to use the food tracer though, it is hard when eating whole foods to figure out how many calories were in your serving of kale and asparagus stir fry over quinoa 🙂

[ADM]

These suggestions are all great and work well.   Also, if you don't see a basic or not so basic ingredient at first, click on seach foods or advanced search.   If you don't find your specific ingredient (your brand of non-wheat pasta or soy yogurt) you can ADD food and even include nutritional info if you'd like.    You'll also see an option when you add food to include a brand and there's an option for HP, which is home prepared.   If I've prepared a large meal, soup or casserole on the weekend that I plan to eat more of during the work week, I use a recipe calculator (like MyFitnessPal or CalorieCalculator) and then add the individual serving size into my food database.  That way all the info is there if I take a serving to work for lunch or freeze a serving for later, my healthy home prepared dish is right there in my foods to click on and then log.   Hope that helps and hope you're enjoying your FitBit!

[Trudishi]

Lou, its good to see others are spending time on creating their own food database too.

Today was my first day with my new Fit Bit One and it took longer than I expected to set up and log foods.

First, because I'm Australian and there is no Aussie food database and second because I'm used to using the MyNetDiary app on my iPhone (which is incredibly easy and intuitive.) I often scan bar codes with MyNetDiary to get instant nutritional info on most foods and there are lots of contributed foods from other users. You can also readily create your own recipes by adding in the ingredients & quantities and the app remembers your recipes and frequently used foods.

Its taking a while to get used to logging food in fitbit.  (Have to admit - I'm using MyNetDiary first then transferring a summary to fitbit.) This is not ideal but its my best option at the moment.  Fitbit favourites are good and I guess I will get used to it as I build up my own data base of home made and Aussie foods.

The fitbit One is very motivating and I just love the sleep function.  Also the calorie in / calorie out guage on the dashboard is excellent.  Overall, I am finding this device and the site very useful.

P.S. looks very much like this is a moodle site. (If it is, I have to say I am a big fan and did you know that Moodle was invented in Australia)

[DblGee]

I made some vegetable soup for my lunch this week.  Logged all the ingredients and my Food Score was a -.02  - who knew....I added a cup of Quinoa and was able to bring it up to a positive score! 

This was my first attempt to do my own recipe - a learning experience no doubt

[DblGee]

Trudishi - I must ask....what is a moodle?

[Trudishi]

DblGee, I was just referring to the interactive web site.  Corporate sites are very customised and its difficult to tell what system is being used.  The fitbit community is not a course, but the forums reminded me of a Moodle...

"Powering tens of thousands of learning environments globally, Moodle is trusted by institutions and organisations large and small, including Shell, London School of Economics, State University of New York, Microsoft and the Open University. Moodle’s worldwide numbers of more than 65 million users across both academic and enterprise level usage makes it the world’s most widely used learning platform."

http://docs.moodle.org/27/en/About_Moodle

[Trudishi]

hi again DblGee

Vegetable soup has got to be a healthy and low calorie meal but it still has calories...  and a .02 food score just doesn't make sense.  I looked up carrots on the fitbit system and found an unusual range of measuring systems (from a jar of carrots to a slice to a cup, etc. and an enormous range of calorie values. For example,  "one serving" of carrots ranged from 15 to 650 calories. 

This is why I dont feel comfortable to base food analysis on the fitbit food database.  Its great that so many people can contribute but the database must be too big to monitor very well. 

I use an app called MyNetDiary because I find the nutritional info more accurate and consistent. (Users contribute to this too but it is monitored pretty well.) Using the iPhone app I can also scan bar codes of packaged foods and get the nutritional info immediately added to my logged meals.  I am using this as a source of info to manually build my own data base of food in fitbit.  I am doing this so that I can see stats on my food, exercise and sleep info all together on my fitbit dashboard. 

I think this site is great and has lots going for it.  The main drawback is the lack of accuracy and consistency with nutritional information.