My Fitness Pal Tricks (you may not know about)

I have been utilizing My Fitness Pal (MFP) since September of 2010 to track my food and control my macros. This has become a "second nature" thing for me to do but yet it can be tedious and I find myself often thinking "man, I am SO TIRED of tracking my food". I not only track but I double check nutritional information against packaging because so many people "cheat" by leaving out things like sodium, fat, carbohydrates ... You can't get an accurate picture of the food you're eating by relying on other people's data entry so I go that extra step ... Well I JUST RECENTLY figured out a VERY USEFUL and time saving tool!
I decided to start the nutrition program that comes along with Focus T25 to see if I could yield better results from following the guidelines formulated by the pros at Team Beachbody. Since I enter all my foods individually not relying on others prior entries this was a task that I was NOT looking forward to. I typically enter my entire week of food by Tuesday of the previous week (if you are a friend of mine on MFP go look, next weeks menu is already entered) and I just found the "Save Meal" tool .

The Save Meal tool will save a meal that you can then choose in order to enter all the ingredients of that meal in your food diary. For items with variable measurement I put "1" for the amount to later be weighed and entered as I am preparing that mean (like avocado or tomato or potatoes) ... It has saved me a TON of time. I have everything entered as (example) Karen's Focus T25 (then name of meal) and that way I just click on 1 item to add ALL items.

I have been saying this for almost 4 years now; PLANNING IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS. If you know what you are putting IN YOUR MOUTH before you put it in your mouth you will have a better gauge of your nutrition. For a while I was getting lazy and not logging everything ... I gained back 9 lbs of the 41 I had lost and am now working to get those 9 lbs off (I have lost 4 1/2 of them thus far) ... But I have been logging EVERYTHING ... the good, the bad and the downright ugly ...

If you can't be honest with yourself about the foods you are eating you won't be successful in meeting your fitness goals. If you want help with your goals please CONTACT ME to help achieve them. Add me on MFP or go Like my Facebook Page and message me there ... I want to help.

Hopefully the tip I gave you here will make the task of entering your food less troublesome ... also GET A FOOD SCALE! It's my lifesaver in the kitchen!