hi everyone,
i'm new to calorie counting, but i've been on this journey since march. so not new to eating healthy, high fiber, low cal.
just started logging cals into fit day yesterday. i wrote my food/cals down for a few days before, but i went nuts. it seemed like so much work. even if i'm eating produce.

so what tips do you have to make it simplier? the customize button has lots of potential

btw, loving all these charts/graphs.

I write my whole meal and snacks down in the morning for the day and add up all the calories then I dont have to think about it at each meal I stick to the meal plan for that day and thats it.

Counting calories does feel overwhelming in the beginning but you will soon learn the calories by heart. I eat the same basic things for bkfst and lunch so I know the calories per serving by heart (took about a month). I like to try new recipes at night so I sit down on Sunday and plan some new meals to try out and then calculate the calories. Then I stick to those meals and serving sizes during the week. Good luck!

it's overwheming, but also very motivating. i want to make sure what i eat/log is fuel.
also, yesterday and today i was very tempted to try 1 bite of food. well i took 1 bite of smoked salmon, shared the rest. but the other foods didnt seem worth the trouble to figure out the cal, or possibly setting myself up for a slippery slope, if i say i dont have to record 1 bite. so i didnt.
not being obsessive, 1 slice of apple isnt going to be a big deal. but it was 1 bite of cheesy enchalada today, and french toast yesterday. those def. count. more mentally than physically. and being careful i dont let 1 bite turn into the whole container is important too.

i do often have the same foods over and over, although its not the same each day. i tend to not plan anything until i am hungry, then make it quickly.
however, if i made the meals and stored in containers some of the time that could work well. if i can avoid thinking about the food. thats 1 problem i had in the past. i'm at home everyday, so i have too much access to food, if that makes sense.

I log everything the night before, however, I also have a "free zone" when it comes to lower calorie items (fruit, lettuce ect. for example. if I log in 2 cups and ended up having 2.5 cups its not a big deal).

I like to eat a similar thing day after day and go through phases, fruit salad and lattes being my current phase.

oh i just 'got' your name lol. great song. and thanks for the tip.

It's ok to just not eat if nothing looks "countable", at say a social event or when eating out. No one notices, and if they do, just imply you had food poisoning last night and are feeling "delicate".

When you go out to eat, look up and enter the calories of what you are going to order before you go. That way you are much less likely to order something you didn't plan. I don't even look at the menu--it's like a Food Playboy.

I can mentally remember things I eat daily or weekly (vegetables, fruit, pasta, bread, oatmeal, etc) so with time even if I don't plan ahead I have a good idea of how much of something I can eat.

Oh--one other thing. GET A KITCHEN SCALE. Best $20 bucks you will ever spend. It is easier, more accurate and less messy than screwing around with measuring cups. And Fitday will do grams for just about everything.

Make sure you know how to use the zero (or tare, or z/t) button. It resets the scale to zero so that you don't even have to do math: put the bowl on the scale, hit zero, it shows zero. Pour in your cereal, say, record the weight, hit zero, pour in your milk, record the weight, hit zero, drop in your strawberries, record the weight. No math, no dirty measuring cups, no wondering if you are packing the measuring cup too full or not full enough. Easy easy easy.

the planning ahead for eating out is a good tip, although i almost never eat away from home. i have a family, most of them needing to GAIN. so they can eat things that i shouldnt very often, like regular cheddar cheese. i love cheese.
so anything thats pretty healthy needs adjustments to fit my needs, and adding a few nuts etc to theirs. if we are even eating the same thing.
i'll have to see what i can do, figure out count for recipes. i often don't measure when cooking. like if i was making lentil soup, lots of veggies. (which they dont want to touch with a ten ft pole.) i should be able to find counts for similar recipes i make.

and i dont know about a scale. i think i'll see how well counting works. if not, back to intuitive eating.

This is the part I'm confused about. Everyone cooks different. So if you cook a meal like lets say pork chops with gravy or a meatloaf how do you calculate it with all the different seasonings you use and the way you prepare it. I hope I explained this right.

A couple different ways

• You can enter the ingredients in singly into your calorie counting program. This works for something simple.
  
• You can enter the ingredients into a website that figures out the calories in recipe. I think sparkpeople has one, and there are others. Just enter "Recipe calorie calculator" into google. Once you get the total calories, you can enter that as a custom item into your calorie counting program, if you use one. This is a lot of work at first, but once you've done it, it's done for ever--most people really don't make that many dishes in the end.
  
• You can go to Allrecipes and see if someone else has basically already done this--find a recipe that is more or less the same as yours (spices and seasonings don't matter if they don't have fat in them) and just go with that.
  
• Or, the lazy answer and the one I do the most--just don't eat things that are complicated to count, or at least don't eat them often, and when you do make a rough guess about calories. If you are off by 100 or so calories once every couple weeks, that's not a big deal.

Thanks Shmead that explains it alot

I've been logging my calories in the Lose It app on my iPhone. It takes a minute or two, but it's not bad. I have to be accountable. As time goes on it gets easier because it saves the items I log, so I don't have to recalculate or look them up every time. I also tend to eat a lot of the same things over and over. I've tried keeping track in my head in the past, but it's too easy for me to forget to add something in.

Shmead, may I ask what scale you're using? I've looked at couple but haven't picked one yet. I've been using a postal scale, but it doesn't look very nice sitting on my kitchen counter, LOL!