Tips for Being Accurate with Food Logging

I can’t emphasize the importance of logging your food before you eat it! People’s ability to recall with accuracy what they have eaten even an hour after they have eaten it is relatively poor. If you wait until the end of the day to log your meals your ability to recall is even going to be worse. 

And while  I know it slows you down by a couple of minutes from wolfing down your meal, the tradeoff is that you’ll likely be more precise in listing the exact types of ingredients and the amounts. In addition, logging at time of eating or shortly after keeps you aware of how many calories and macros you have left in your budget. If you wait until the end of the day to log - you may be surprised to find out that the stack of pancakes you had for breakfast took up way more calories than you imagined.

There is much variability within the nutritional content of certain foods. Take chicken for example, 100 grams of cooked chicken breast contains 168 calories compared to 100 grams of skin-on chicken thighs cooked which contains 232 calories. That’s a 64 calorie difference in that one entry. 

If you select the wrong entry for multiple foods in a given day, it's going to really throw off the accuracy of your numbers. So be as specific as you can when choosing the right entry. Ask yourself: what percentage leanness was the ground beef? Are you eating farm-raised or wild salmon (wild typically has much less fat)? Was the pasta whole grain or made with enriched flour (the whole grain will have more fiber)?  

The more specific you can get with your food entries the more accurate ALL of your nutrient values will be.

This one tends to trip people up often. There is a difference nutritionally between the raw and cooked state of a food. In some cases, the food may become more calorically dense in the cooked state as it loses water (e.g chicken breast) and in other cases it may become less calorically dense as it absorbs water (e.g pasta). 

When choosing whether to input the raw or cooked measure of the food, you want to use the measure in which you weighed it. So if you weighed out 100 grams  of cooked chicken then find an entry for cooked chicken and input 100 grams and vice versa for the raw state. 

Sometimes you’ll only have the nutrition information for the raw or cooked product - in that case you’ll want to weigh it in the state in which the nutrition information is available. For example, the nutrition facts for pasta will generally be based on the dry weight (typically 2 oz). You'll want to input the dry/raw weight of your pasta into your app if you are using the nutrition facts panel for that product (as in the case of using the bar code scanner feature).

Do you have a food scale? If not, I’d recommend that you get one to improve the accuracy of your food logging. Not only is it more accurate to use the weight of your food than the volumetric measurement (e.g cup,  tablespoon) but it is also a more logical way to measure foods that don’t fit nicely into a measuring cup. 

For example, if you try to measure out a cup of cooked spaghetti -there’s a few ways you could do it. On one hand, you may be able to pack the spaghetti noodles tightly into the cup by first twirling them around a fork and then shoving them into the cup. But you could also haphazardly heap them into the cup and get a much more loosely packed cup of spaghetti. In both of these scenarios, you measured them by the cup but the amount and weight would likely be very different. Whereas measuring out 4 oz of cooked spaghetti is 4 ounces.

This article is about being accurate with tracking but I’m also a realist in that you’re not always going to be able to measure foods. When you go out to eat, have a meal at a friend’s house, or any other occasion that takes you away from your kitchen scale you’ll have to rely on your best judgment. I know all of my perfectionists out there, hate to hear this - but the reality is logging something is always better than logging nothing even if it's not entirely accurate.  Use the following guidelines when estimating portions away from home:

• 1 deck of cards  = 3 oz of meat or fish 🥩🍣
• 2 pair of dice = 1 oz of cheese🧀 
• 1 golf ball = 2 Tbsp of nut butter, salad dressing or sauce 
• 1 closed fist = 1 cup of pasta, rice, or fruit or vegetables 🍝🍚🥗

Occasionally I will see clients making the mistake of choosing a very vague food entry to represent the dish they ate. For example, if you ate a BLT sandwich at a cafe - I wouldn’t recommend choosing just any ‘BLT’ entry you can find and call it a day. Reason being, you have no idea how much of each ingredient went into the nutrition facts for that entry. 

Instead, break your sandwich down into its components by estimating the amounts of each ingredient (e.g. 2 slices of whole wheat bread, 2 Tbsp of regular mayonnaise, 4 strips of bacon cooked, etc). This will provide you with a more accurate representation of what you truly ate rather than choosing a random entry that fits the description. T

he one exception to this would be dishes that are fully composed/mixed and difficult to break down at the ingredient levels (e.g lasagna, soup, casseroles). In cases like this, it’s fine to choose an entry that closely matches your description because obviously it would be hard to break down a dish like this into its individual ingredients. 

Certain food logging apps allow  ‘user-added’ entries that in their database which are often incomplete. Incomplete entries may only have calories listed and may be missing multiple macronutrients or micronutrients; it can also be difficult to determine what serving size the nutrition information represents. 

To avoid selecting ‘user-added’ entries that may be incomplete, there are a couple ways around this. Depending on the food logging app you are using, some have the ability to select ‘verified’ only’ entries like with LoseIt, others identify the source of the nutrition information (e.g USDA as in the case of Cronometer, and then there are other apps that only source 100% verified data like LogEat.io.

This may seem like a no-brainer but it pains me to see how many people only partially log what they have eaten in the day. They may start off strong and record their breakfast and lunch - but then by mid-afternoon they have completely forgotten about tracking their vending machine snack or the few pieces of candy they took off their co-workers desk. 

All of these bites, nibbles, and sips add up over the course of the day - so do your best to jot them down to stay accurate. If you have trouble remembering to log - consider sending yourself a daily notification that pops up on your phone. In addition, don't get caught in the trap of not logging something because you feel guilty for eating it or it's not aligned perfectly with your nutrition goals. 

It doesn't make you a bad person that you ate a cookie, or drank too many glasses of wine. The purpose of logging is to keep you aware of your food choices -and the act of not logging something is more or less denying the fact that you ate or drank it at all. Don't do that to yourself.

I hope you have found these tips helpful as you move forward and begin your journey tracking your food. Remember tracking your food is something you don’t do for your entire life, you do it for the purpose of reaching a certain goal whether it be weight-loss, muscle gain, or even identify food intolerances.

And while initially, tracking can feel tedious and even challenging - know that the more reps you put in the easier it becomes. And overtime tracking will teach you a lot about your own eating habits and empower you with the nutrition knowledge you need so eventually know exactly how much you need without relying on an app.