CRON-o-Meter and eating out

Michael asks about using diary tools like CRON-o-Meter when you eat out. (And, yes, Michael, your comments show up in my email). Tools like CRON-o-Meter are just estimates. They are based on a USDA database that took samples of food. One tomato is not exactly like another - so the calories are just and estimate. Just because it says that 100 grams of the tomato they sample were 18 calories does not mean that your tomato is not sweeter. It might have 24 calories in it. Don't even imagine that they are accurate to the single digit range.

It is not meaningful, in general, to track calories for a single day. After all, you might eat twice as many the day before and the day after - and not be doing calories restriction at all. If you weight things at home a lot, you will get pretty good at estimating weight based on size. Entering data day after day, the amounts will get more and more accurate on average, since some days you will overestimate and some days you will underestimate.

But, what about eating out? If you eat out at a chain that posts nutrition data, then you can enter data more easily. But, even so, you will need to estimate ingredients for a dish. I often go on the web and search on " recipe" - like "enchilada recipe". This typically gives you a list of recipes for the thing you ate. I am a veteran recipe reader and can figure out which one matches most closely to what I actually ate. I then wil enter the reciple into to tool and can use it after that. Assuming you have entries or recipes for all the food, now you have to estimate the weight. One useful rule of thumb is that 100g is the size of your hand (without fingers). The more you estimate, the better you will get at it and the more your overestimates will cancel out the underestimates.