I hate myfitnesspal. I suppose I should join you guys on it. I have intense difficulty estimating my food correctly. I buy lunch from my work cafeteria whenever I am there. They don't provide calorie counts. It's a salad & soup every day, so the salad is almost negligible tbh, but the soups vary and make a big impact. My strategy had been to simply choose a soup like the soup I'd had that day and use those calories. I suspect this is an ineffective way to go about it. However, uh....what else can I do? Also, my mom's cooking (I'm living at home so that happens a lot now) - not sure how to account for that unless I take the recipe, total the calories in it from all the items, and divide it out. Which can be time consuming and boring. Anyone got any suggestions? The other route I've used is to mostly eat processed/packaged foods because, hey, the calories are right on them - but processed foods aren't good in general and mess with my blood sugar too much too often, besides.
At least for me, the point isn't to be calorifically perfect, the point is to track one's intake consciously so one keeps roughly under a daily goal to achieve roughly one's long term aims. (And keep an eye on micronutrients to see if you're crazy deficient in something vital.) On the whole I (and I assume many people) eat many of the same things day in day out, so once entered the regular meals are very quick to select. Try Noom who make apps which measure things by 'a handful' and 'a golfball sized portion' of various foodstuffs. Really quick to enter the meal.
Yeah that's my problem too, as a foreign food eater. Myfitnesspal doesn't know what koufta or foōl or besboosa is, and if they do, it's not accurate to the stuff I make, and then yeah the whole "totaling things out" angle is too much work for not enough gain.