Food Eaten Away from Home - How to Record

MsCheryl

How do you record food that is not in the database and you have no idea what's in it? In this case a piece of birthday cake. I never eat such things and could not say what it was.

Karen_Cronometer

Hi MsCheryl,

I would recommend searching for something from NCCDB that is your closest estimate of the food you ate away from home.

Birthday cake, as an example, I would use white cake and then also add Frosting, Chocolate, Ready to Spread or Frosting, White or Flavored, Ready to Spread (depending on the flavor) and estimate my serving sizes.

golden1212

This is a really tough problem. I had a lot of difficulty trying to estimate macros on a recent trip.

One of the problems is that you sort of have to decide if you are actually trying to track macros of unknown foods, or if you are simply not tracking macros that day.

In almost all cases, I choose to continue tracking the macros anytime I can. The challenge is normally that for some foods in a day, I know the macros with accuracy, but then I go to a restaurant with a family, and it's super hard to estimate macros for one dish or meal.

What I'd like to see is an accuracy flag on a food diary entry that allows me to specify that this food entry is potentially inaccurate. That way, I'm recording the data I can, and also specifying when a food entry could be inaccurate, or maybe could be updated/revised when I'm not at the table with my family.

Tomk

Is it rude to carry a scale into the restaurant to weigh the individual parts of the plate?