Logging food you didn't cook

No label, no scales, someone else's portions. The practical way to log a meal out without giving up on the week.

Around 6 minutes · Eating out

Most food diaries work beautifully until you eat something you didn't make. Then you're staring at a plate someone else built, with no label, no weights, and a growing suspicion that you should just not log today.

Not logging is the worst available option, and it is the one almost everybody picks. Here is how to do the other thing.

Start with the published figures, and know their limits

Big chains publish nutrition information, and it's genuinely useful — it comes from a standardised recipe and a real analysis. Use it when it exists.

Two caveats worth holding onto. It describes the standard build: the burger as specified, with the sauce as specified, assembled by someone following the spec. Real kitchens are staffed by real people and portions drift. And it describes the item, not your order — no mayo, extra cheese, a different side, and you are already away from the published number.

Independent restaurants publish nothing at all, and that's most places you'll eat.

Build the plate from parts you can name

The trick that makes this tractable: don't try to find "chicken katsu curry" as a single item. Break the plate into components you can estimate individually, because you have a much better instinct for a chicken breast and a cup of rice than for a composite dish.

These are approximations and they are meant to be. The point is that five reasonable component estimates add up to something much closer than one anxious guess at the whole plate — errors in either direction partly cancel, where a single guess just is whatever it is.

Three places restaurant calories hide

Fat you can't see

Restaurant food tastes better partly because it contains more butter and oil than you'd use at home. Vegetables arrive glossy. Sauces are finished with butter. This is the single biggest gap between a dish as you'd cook it and the same dish out, and it is invisible. A reasonable habit: if a dish arrives shining, add 100-150 kcal to whatever you first thought.

Portion size

A restaurant serving of pasta is commonly двое what you'd plate at home. The dish isn't different; there's just more of it. When in doubt, estimate the portion generously and the ingredients honestly.

Drinks

Three pints is most of a meal. Alcohol is seven calories a gram — between carbohydrate and fat — and it arrives with no sense of being food at all. Log the drinks before you agonise over whether the chicken was 140g or 170g, because the drinks are the bigger number.

Just get it approximately right, now

The instinct is to leave it until you can look it up properly, and then it's Thursday and the meal is gone. An estimate logged at the table beats a perfect entry you never make, for exactly the reason the rest of this applies: the diary's value is in being complete, not exact.

The one habit that pays off

Estimate it, log it, and then save it. You go to the same handful of places. The Friday curry, the work lunch, the usual Sunday pub order — get each one roughly right once and it's a single tap forever after, with the same figure every time.

That consistency matters more than the accuracy of the original estimate. If your saved "Nando's usual" is 80 calories light, it is 80 calories light every time, and it cancels out of your maintenance arithmetic the same way every other systematic error does. Consistency beats accuracy, and eating out is where that principle earns its keep.

What we do about this

QuicKcals lets you describe a meal in plain English — "half a chicken, chips and a pint" — and itemises it, showing the portion it assumed for each part so you can correct the one that's wrong rather than rejecting the lot. It's marked as an estimate, because it is one. Then you save it, and next Friday it's one tap.