Keeping a food diary on MyFitnessPal

Hello,

       As part of my supervised weight loss my PCP wants me to keep a food diary which I started doing yesterday.  I find this incredibly tedious but I understand the reasoning behind it.  Per many references on OH regarding MyFitnessPal I signed up just for the food diary.  I love that I can scan a bar code with my phone and the food automatically registers!  All I have to do is alter the serving sizes if needed.  I also love that it gave me a range of calories to shoot for each day in order to lose 1 pound a week.  A bonus is being able to run a report with set date parameters to print for my doctor appointments.  Oh so convenient!  Way better than using Excel to make my own diary.  Not so tedious after all. 

I use my fitness pal, but I still write it down in a book anyway, guess I'm old fashioned like that, it's probably why I still write in a journal rather than a blog. I like opening up my book & looking at a glance what I ate all week as opposed to scrolling thru the days on my iPad, but I love how it breaks everything down so I can see how much fat, salt, protein etc I had each day.

Good for you! I dislike journaling. I admire people who do it and enjoy it. 

Oh yes I've been journaling since I was a little girl. I still have my 1st journal when I was a kid, it's a little white book with a lock on it & a picture of the strawberry shortcake kid & a bunch of sparkly stickers. I guess if I ever had a little girl I'd show it to her to prove that, yes I was a little girl at 1 point & to show her how I saw the world how I saw it back then. Not that anything was earth shattering at 10. lol Oh well I guess it wasn't in the cards.

The Sparkpeople.com site has a feature that is "Commonly Used Menu" items which makes it really simple to enter items that you repeatedly use;  does MFP do that too?  I found it really convenient.

Yes it does.. I find myfitnesspal app easier to use than the  sparkpeople tracker. 

I'm lazy. When I was told to start a food diary right after surgery, I cringed. I also started using MyFitnessPal because it seemed easier than writing things down. It's now been almost 900 days, and I weigh and log all my food every day. It's now second nature, takes only a few minutes every day, and isn't a burden at all. It has really kept me on track.

Hi There, I had a question for you.  I really like myfitnesspal too and was able to lose some weight on it.  I haven't yet had my surgery, but when I do, I would like to continue using it as a tracker.  I liked how it set the amount of calories (daily calorie goal) I could eat in a day and as I wrote down the food through the day, it let me know how many I have left at the end of the day.  After your surgery, do you use that part of the app and if so, how as it is based on your current weight and your calories have to be so much less than what they suggest. 

I hope you understand my question...... I appreciate your help

I also really like the recipe builder on there.  It makes it really easy to put in a recipe (or even just the link to an online recipe), and it will figure out the calories per serving.  

I love MFP!!! If you have a Fitbit or decide to get one to track your steps you can connect it to you MFP account and the two will automatically synced.