does anyone els find the food tracker to be less than anticipated?

[NewDawn]

does anyone els find the food tracker to be less than anticipated? The foods I enter and brands are rarely available resulting in much manual entry. The purpose of this Fitbit was to simplify my life. The Sleep tracking is great as are the steps. but the Food well...

[Jessica1675]

Thanks C Michelle!

[uncharted]

I have to agree.  I have used MyFitnessPal and SparkPeople and both apps have far superior food trackers. I would love to see some of the other elements that the other apps have also (i.e. tips of the day, articles, etc.).

[gemi643]

Sometimes you just have to guess or approximate. If it is something you
make from scratch you can add the individual ingredients/measurements. If
you prepare something from a package mix and add ingredients just log them
individually and call them a meal (dividing by the number of servings,
etc.)

[CMichelle]

Definitely - or, if you are **ahem** like me, I calculate out homemade dishes I regularly prepare, per serving and then enter them manually into Fitbit.  Then, they are saved forever to use over and over again.  The initial process is time consuming but eventually, you build up a decent list for yourself.

[slysam]

I mentioned this before, I really like Spark People's recipe calculator. It is actually my favorite feature on Spark People. You enter the total ingredients and quantity in, then you tell it how many servings are in the recipe and it generates a nutrition label. You can save your recipes and they are easy to edit if you tweek things a little. If Spark and Fitbit are linked, Spark will log the food to fitbit including the name of the recipe. You can also make your recipes public and browse other public recipes (and add them to your nutrition tracker if you use them). Most good nutrition tracking apps have recipe calculators, I just prefer Spark's because of the sharing option and I find it gives more detailed nutrition (vitamins and minerals) than the others I tried. I find MyFitnessPal easiest to use, though I don't prefer their recipe calculator. I like using a recipe calculator over saving meals because for some recipes i.e. a pot of soup, a cake, etc it gets a little weird doing it in a meal tracker. For example a recipe that feeds four that uses two eggs--I would log it a 1/2 egg if I were doing it as a meal. It is workable, just sometimes isn't ideal.

[nevermind]

I appreciate the advice on alternative webpages to log food but I'm disappointed in that FitBit doesn't do a better job of providing the information straight out.  I feel this dashboard is part of the product I bought and it should provide more than this.  At least include a bar code scanner so I can save myself that step.

[dmk2015]

This sounds like a good idea to make the initial effort to enter the info when making meals at home.  Probably the more one pays attention to what is going into recipes and eating foods made at home the better off we'll each be.

[gogo1]

My Fitness Pal also has the correct nutrional info.  FitBit is not correct.

[cjrussell]

I agree with you on both counts. If I don't have time to enter a new food I just pick one that is similar & has close to the same calories. I love the sleep tracker!

[honey2two]

This probably isn't a big help, but my calories update from myfitnesspal every time it syncs.

[rholeinna]

I find the food tracker has too many options for things that should have fewer options, like a kiwi, but not enough options for food people eat and need to track like tacos or soups.

There seem to be a lot of people talking about My Fitness Pal. Is that easy to sync the food, and use Fitbits calories in/calories out feature?

[bonjati]

For me that lives in a smaller country that are not on the developers prio list food log is useless since the food database its based on dosen´t work here. (Which it the tech country of Sweden btw) Very few other apps does this well though, so I didn´t expect it to be useful.