Food diary paralysis

April 15, 2009 10:29 PM

When keeping a food diary, what is a good strategy for estimation?

I'm not sure what's a reasonable way to go out to a restaurant, eyeball a dish and come up with a reasonable calorie count for it. Is there a guideline or rule of thumb to follow>

posted by boo_radley to food & drink (10 comments total)

This is a tough one. People would not believe how many calories are in the things they eat in restaurants. I think most people would grossly underestimate.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 10:36 PM on April 15

Do you ALWAYS eat out at restaurants? Every couple of months if I find myself gaining weight, I "recalibrate" by being completely anal retentive about measuring for a while. I've got some little bowls that are sized something like 2 cups, one and a half cups, etc., down to about a quarter cup, and I eat my food out of them for a while. Better, fill one with rice or whatever and then put it on a normal size plate to eat. Then I see how much one cup really is on a plate, and accustom myself to visualizing it. Cooking your own food helps, too, so you're always measuring and you can eventually just FEEL how big a cup of whatever looks. So do that every time you eat at home for a while, and you'll train yourself to estimate more accurately. And when you feel like you've got it, you can stop measuring for a while, and just estimate. Until you need to again.

And, when I'm using FitDay (or whatever tracking method you're a fan of) I often just add an extra tablespoon or so of oil when entering restaurant meals because I figure they're using more fat in cooking than I would or the pre-entered nutritional info accounts for.
posted by ruby.aftermath at 10:50 PM on April 15

There are some good web apps and iPhone/iPod touch apps that have nice internal databases from which you can either find the thing itself, for chain places, or come up with your own estimate based on the ingredients. I like The Daily Plate and Lose It! (my current favorite).
posted by wheat at 10:50 PM on April 15

Here's a list of comparisons between single servings of different foods and how they should visually match up to the size of common everyday objects. Does that help?
posted by marsha56 at 11:11 PM on April 15

Through practice, I'm pretty good at estimating the amount of rice/pasta/vegetables/etc i eat (i.e., 1 cup, .5 cup, 1.5 cups), as well as protein portions (in oz). Like ruby.aftermath said, if you measure out portions at home, you'll develop those skills.

I always add 1-3 tablespoons of oil to restaurant food if I'm not sure how it's cooked. Restaurants tend to use a lot of oil/butter/fat because it makes the food taste better.

So, I combine the above methods - if I eat at say, a Thai restaurant, I can estimate 1c of mixed vegetables, 1/3 cup white meat chicken, 1 cup rice, and then I'll add on 2T of oil and figure that's accurate enough.
posted by insectosaurus at 11:22 PM on April 15

From experience, I suggest signing up for a free Fitday account and searching the USDA database that's built in first. Then Google the web for any dishes you can't find there, and adding them as custom foods. I even use the custom foods function to save calorie/nutrient info for my own recipes. Super handy. As mentioned above, you'll catch on to the serving sizes quickly as most are listed in fairly intuitive terms.
posted by xiaolongbao at 12:43 AM on April 16

When I used to keep a food diary, I followed all of the above tips to estimate my portion size.

Then, when I recorded my restaurant meals I figured out what I expected the calorie content to be...and doubled it.
posted by sickinthehead at 5:08 AM on April 16

A good "tip" to make sure restaurant portions are at least nutritionally comparable with normal portions is to ask for a take-out container right away, move half your food into it and then eat the rest. That's a normal portion and you can estimate the calories for the food (e.g. x calories for chicken breast, x calories for veg) and add 2 tbsp of butter/oil like insectosaurus says.

Also try this website for common fast food and restaurants. If you can't find the exact thing you're looking for, you may find something similar.
posted by cranberrymonger at 7:49 AM on April 16

Another alternative to Fitday is SPARKPEOPLE. It includes calorie counts for many common dishes at popular restaurants. Some are official and many have been added by other users. All the other tips are excellent too. I don't think that there's a particular rule to follow. When I'm really stuck I just guess all the individual components of the meal and add a bit extra.

At the end of the day it's not an exact science, but all the websites listed above will help a lot.
posted by ask me please at 9:58 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]

Christ, I think I ate 6,000 calories last night.
posted by boo_radley at 10:27 AM on April 16