Making Food Logging Easy
Will that slice of pizza actually get you off track?
Everyone hates logging food, but it’s actually the best way to keep yourself on track and have a slice of pizza. When we started tracking our macros, certain things were pretty shocking. I love a cheese and charcuterie platter, and I expected that to be off limits, but a few small slices of cheese can be around 100 calories if you watch your portions.
However, the surprises came from “healthy” choices that are actually more calorie dense than I realized. I love to add a scoop of peanut butter to my oatmeal, but that alone is about 100 calories. A handful of almonds is 162 calories, and my beloved granola is around 200 calories/serving, and the serving size (typical granola is only about 50g/serving) is surprisingly small. Check out this comparison of what 100 calories looks like in different foods - you can have an entire plate of broccoli or that little wedge of cheese for 100 calories.
This is not to say you “can’t” eat certain foods or need to be particularly restrictive. BODYSIM gives you awareness and control over how you are putting those foods together within your day.
Training our Macro Tracking Muscles
We like to think about training our macro tracking muscles much in the same way we train our body. We build a routine, and we learn how to estimate the weight of foods by looking at volumes to stay on track even when we aren’t preparing our own food. Knowing what 2 oz. of cheese looks like helps you stay on track even when you have a cheese platter. However, in order to get started with accurate numbers, it is essential to methodically weigh ingredients while cooking at home repeatedly.
The BODYSIM database includes millions of common items, with a barcode scanner for packaged goods, so most foods are easy to find and log. In case your food is not in the database yet, we have a nutrition label scanner that allows you to quickly capture the details for new foods, or you can add it as a custom food. Custom foods are a great shortcut for restaurants with calories posted on their website!
Pros and Cons of Crowdsourced Data
Most BODYSIM clients have logged before. They might even have had a lot of success using apps like MyFitnessPal or Foodnoms. However, when you start tracking with BODYSIM, you need to start paying attention to things that you might not be taking into account with other apps.
Here’s an example of top results when searching for a NY Strip steak in MyFitnessPal:
MFP Steak Image
While both results are “verified”, the three and four ounce versions have the same number of calories (and same number of grams of fat). These likely originated from user-generated data. User generated data can be great when another user enters macros correctly, but that’s not always the case.
We’ve kept the structure of the USDA data fairly closely intact, sorting it all by category so you can drill down to your exact cut and trim in the case of meats. You can see in the image below, the user can get very detailed on their strip steak in order to get exactly the right number of calories and fat/ounce.
The other challenge with user generated data is that you may type in “mashed potatoes” and get wildly different results. This is what we call “the butter problem” because just adding a few additional tablespoons of butter can vastly change the macros of a dish, even when it looks incredibly similar.
Flexible “Menu” Building Blocks
All foods logged in BODYSIM are treated as groups of foods/ingredients, which makes it easy to re-use your favorite homemade salad dressing over and over again. If you name them, they appear in search even without making a special recipe. The advantage of making a recipe is that you can reflect the multiple servings recipes usually make and you can share them. Flexibly move between foods, meals and recipes with no arbitrary limits (unlike any other tracker). Mix and match groups and recipes to create complete meals (unlike any other tracker).
Other flexible convenience features include quickly adding something you have previously logged food or group from your journal and long press to “eat again”. As well as easily moving between journal and meal plans and recipes.
Eating Out
The one scenario where you will always be forced to make some guesses is when you eat out. Check to see if your restaurant makes nutrition data available. Some of the places where you love to eat will inevitably not have that information, so we usually assume most dishes contain extra oil or butter in restaurants, and do our best to estimate quantities using common rules of thumb. For example, a tablespoon of butter is approximately the size of an average thumb! When you have to estimate a restaurant meal, it’s a good idea to be liberal in your estimation.
If, like myself, you have a weakness for a side of french fries, it’s incredibly helpful to either get fries from your favorite restaurant to go or make some frozen fries and weigh out 100g to get a really good sense of how many fries that is and what it looks like. I typically log half of the USDA “family style” french fries, which is 85g, equivalent to about a McDonalds size small. Knowing exactly what I’m getting with a small portion of fries makes it easy to enjoy them as a treat without the panic that my body will never recover.
Keeping the Averages on Track
Best laid plans do go awry at times and it’s easy to both over indulge and lose track during special occasions and celebrations. You may be tempted to over-correct the next day or engage in self-criticism but think about your week as whole and course-correct the average for the week. Correction is easier to take spread over several days versus a single day of severe calorie restriction.
BODYSIM provides charts of each macro over the last two weeks, allowing you to see how well you are keeping on track in general, even if one or two days don’t go exactly to plan.
Food Logging is Still Going to Be Hard
Logging food is never easy, no matter how nice the experience is. We’ve built a lot of flexibility into the process for logging in BODYSIM to keep your values accurate, but still get your log done as painlessly as possible. We’re continually improving the food logging workflow through user feedback and our own experience. We believe that logging food absolutely pays off because it’s the best way to get a really dialed in digital twin.