food tracking pain points

“Tracking is a pain to keep up with and I feel like I’m not sticking to the diet if I’m not keeping up with tracking.”

“Agree! I start tracking for the first week (if that) then just forget or I don’t feel like it…I find it tedious and annoying!”

“So overall, my approach is having a pretty significant negative impact on my life and is actively making my life worse not better.”

“Because I cook every day and it's a pain in the ass to add every single ingredient”

“Every single time I eat, it's like this whole process. At home I'm constantly weighing stuff and when I cook something, ugh - have to add every little ingredient to my app.... it's just so much work!”

“I spend more time being a food accountant than actually enjoying my meals 😫”

“I food tracked for a few months, and it honestly got too annoying to constantly keep updating.”

“It's the ladder you climb up then throw away. For years, folks said "just listen to your body...your body will tell you when you're full." Except, that was the problem.”

“I don't like turning eating into data entry.”

“I find logging meals, counting protein and calories, studying labels, etc to be very triggering and makes me obsessive.”

“I don't track anything. I've done so in the past and I find it very detrimental for me from a mental health perspective.”

“Saaaaame. It puts me in a very obsessive and negative head space. It's not something I can do for any real length of time.”

“As a result any deviations from my usual quite rigid routine gives me anxiety, which affects my life pretty significantly e.g. social occasions, work”

“my approach is having a pretty significant negative impact on my life and is actively making my life worse not better.”

“I think a lot of people get obsessive about it tbh I do a little too but now I have a little fear if I’m not tracking in a way -it’s good peace of mind but also stressful and time consuming.”

“Same for me. I started to concentrate more on the number of calories consumed, rather than the quality of the foods I was eating.”

“Yup! It brought me right up to the edge of having an eating disorder.”

“I definitely would never want to slip back into ED territory, or even any other kind of “less severe” issues with food/diet-culture.”

“The holidays especially highlighted this for me as it's so annoying to have to do 20 mins of mental gymnastics for every meal to ensure I'm tracking it properly and not blowing out my macros.”

“I can’t stay consistent because a lot of my food is homemade with lots of ingredients (think multi-veggie stir fry with tons of spices) and non measured portions. It’s so hard to guesstimate and feels like I’m just not going to be getting exact results anyway, so why bother.”

“The absolute worst is when I grab something quick from a street vendor or eat at a local place. How the hell am I supposed to know how many calories are in that?”

“I had no idea this was an option. Even if it was in the roughest of ballparks in terms of accuracy I feel like it would be so helpful.”

“For me personally, i have to stick to my usual meals. yeah, it really sucks having to decline someone's offer for takeout and whatnot but unless something has an actual calorie count, it's off limits for me!”

“What I'm saying is that often there is a lot of variation in the information that comes up in google searches. What I am having trouble with is finding a reliable source of information.”

“It gets complicated when you're cooking or worse eating out at restaurants. I would bet people underestimate calories when eating out and accurate measurements/numbers are probably dang near impossible.”

“I weighed/measured, wrote down everything I ate in every weight loss attempt since I was 13! ... I haven't tracked a thing other than water since starting Zepbound in April. I've lost 64 pounds so far, not feeling deprived, feeling great!”

“Has anyone here meticulously tracked macros for a period of time, then eventually moved off tracking completely and still found longterm success *maintaining* weight using things like hand portion control, slow eating, etc. etc.?”

“MFP was detrimental to my mental health and didn’t help my fueling needs as an athlete. ... I think MFP is a useful tool for understanding if you’re hitting your nutritional needs but then at a certain point you can know what you need/how much protein/carbs/fats are in the foods you typically eat and can fuel properly without it.”

“Once you start acquiring the experience and wisdom of what food actually does MFP become just a chore and mental gymnastics. If you eat a normal, healthy, balanced nutritionis diet (which you will slowly learn counting) you won't need to track anything.”

“So it pretty much worked. It's not meant to be a forever thing.”

“At let's face it, unless you're exposed to a vast and ever changing dietary landscape, your day-to-day is pretty much the same. I do go back every couple of months or so and record the #s for a week or so, just to see where I am, what my gap is.”

“I am much too rigid and perfectionistic.”

“Feel like I have to hit the target as close as possible every day”

“As a result any deviations from my usual quite rigid routine gives me anxiety, which affects my life pretty significantly e.g. social occasions, work”

“Feel like I have to be really precise. I know macrofactor is meant to have good tolerance for being out a bit, but hanging around Reddit fitness subreddits and you'll see the sentiment that precision is absolutely necessary and this has gotten into my head and I don't feel very comfortable with estimation”

“I have a history of bulimia and recognize that long term calorie tracking has the potential to become extremely harmful for me, so I don’t do it.”

“I used MFP but I stopped because the UI sucked, it was slow, the verified nutrition info is wrong quite a bit and they locked a lot of simple features behind their paywall.”

“I would like to use MFP, but I'm not going to sign up for a membership to use it so I just don't use it at all. I'm not going to pay a membership to any company.”

“I found MyFitnessPal to be less cumbersome than the Fitbit app. That said, it was still cumbersome.”

“The bar code scanner in MFP helps a lot, but the UI still isn't as slick as it should be with too many steps.”

“What is a reliable source for calorie/macro information for Indian food?”

“MyFitnessPal is good too, but there are multiple entries of a food item showing different caloric count.”

“The healthifyme app was easier for that”

“What I'm saying is that often there is a lot of variation in the information that comes up in google searches. What I am having trouble with is finding a reliable source of information.”

“I don’t track anything. I practice intuitive eating and concentrate on making sure my plate has a balance of protein, carbs, and fat. Tracking was too much for me. I was obsessive!”

“I deal with it by not doing it, at least not in that way. I eat simply and repetitively; I know what foods are in the mix of different things I eat, which is still a significant variety nutritionally, so I don't need to just weigh every single thing I eat.”

“I don’t think I can see any other comments from you in the comments section besides this one!”

“Maybe if tracking seems tricky for you now, you could work on frequency rather than recording the amount you eat. It could be just setting an alarm on your phone for every X amount of time and checking in with yourself then.”

“Anyone else find food tracking exhausting and wish it was simpler?”

“I would find it so helpful.”

“I think if I met a genie I'd waste one of my wishes so I could magically just Know how many calories I have consumed.”