does anyone els find the food tracker to be less than anticipated?

[NewDawn]

does anyone els find the food tracker to be less than anticipated? The foods I enter and brands are rarely available resulting in much manual entry. The purpose of this Fitbit was to simplify my life. The Sleep tracking is great as are the steps. but the Food well...

[patzwz · Accepted solution]

I've seen a number of complaints about this. In the help section people can vote for ideas to improve and this is one of the ideas that's mentioned quite often, so if you want to make a difference, make sure to vote in there.
For now the advice I can give you is to start using My Fitness Pal to register your food intake (only that, keep on using Fitbit for activities)
Their database is much more extensive and it syncs perfectly to Fitbit

[peanut999]

I use My fitness pal and sync it with fitbit.. has a much more extensive food list, can create recipes of food you cook regulalry.. works well using the app on a phone/tablet.. has a bar scanner that helps with a lot of pre prepared foods etc.. 

[whome]

Ditto to both of the above - 

[modernfossil26]

I have been using myfitnesspal to track my food as I can use my smartphone to scan most any product and it can be synced with the fitbit account to count my calories.  This has been the most helpful because I also had a hard time with the food tracker.  If you use this fitbit no longer keeps track of the nutrition but myfitnesspal has a bunch of different graphs and things if you wanted a breakdown of your nutritional intake.

[slysam · Accepted solution]

There are at least three different nutrition trackers that an log to fitbit for you. I've tried

*loseit.com , I believe it logs the speciic foods. This is the first that linked with fitbit and it didn't click with how I log so haven't used it since new options were added. But is works well for some.

*myfitnesspal.com , this maybe easiest to use for food logging though it only logs meal summaries to fitbit not specific foods.

*sparkpeople.com , this does log specific foods but doesn;'t update corrections you make on Spark to fitbit. I like this one because it includes the vitamins and minterals of many foods so is helpful for general nutition tracking. I think MFP is a little easier to use though.

[Bekkah]

I agree with the above posters... I also use MyFitnessPal and it syncs perfectly

[1946old]

I use loseit , works great with my fitbit

[gemi643]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try My Fitness Pal. I too got discouraged when I had to enter foods I use from their packaging. I had to make them "Favorites" in order to keep them available when I ate them again, especially when modifying the serving size to what I actually ate.

[NewDawn]

Kudos to Fitbit!!! 

Now I can create meals. As a Vegan this is most helpful because I eat a lot of repeats; especially my salads. Thanks for hearing us.

[supercanuck]

I love entering food using MyFitness but I've noticed the last couple of days that the food I've entered doesn't sync to Fitbit 'automatically.' Does it only sync at the end of the day? Or when I'm back hom at my home computer or what? 

I'm always interested to see the calories throughout the day in Fitbit as I enter them but it shows 0 even though I have entered 320 into MFP, as an example. 

[Malpeg]

I use MyNetDiary to log my food and to track all I need to track to manage my diabetes. It took me a little bit to get all set up but Ive been pleased with the integration.

[SunsetRunner]

Honestly I just use my fitness pal to keep track of food, pounds, water, etc and it automatically goes into Fitbit on my dashboard. That way I don't have to keep track of everything twice.

[CMichelle]

I too am disappointed in the Food section of Fitbit - I have used My Fitness Pal for almost 3 years now and hoping to use it exclusively because frankly, am I fed up with the My Fitness Pal app issues.  It would lock up, lock up my phone (and I have a Samsung Galaxy S4) or sit there and spin and spin when I would search for food so was hoping to find something that was a little faster.  So far, I am typing all my food in on the Fitbit website and if they don't have the exact item I want, I find the most comparable to calories, then fat and protein, secondary.  Not the best, most accurate way to do it but at least my calories are correct.

Hopefully, as time goes by, their Food list will become more extensive and make life a lot easier on all of us!

[Annpatalexa]

Hey,

I find that to be frustrating too. I tend to jump between FitBit and LoseIt for tracking. This week I've been using FitBit but I think I'm going to go back to LoseIt since it seems to track easier.

[SunsetRunner]

Another vote for MyFitnessPal.  I use it as my "master" record keeper and just link everything up to it.  I let it sort out the differences in say, Fitbit, my HRM, and Digifit.  It is really not worth the effort to me to try to keep track of each one individually.  MFP has a very good food database and I find that using the bar code scanner is a great feature that I use pretty regularly.  When I was a Weight Watcher member I thought their food database was quite good and really liked their recipe builder but it was not strong enough compared to MFP to be worth the $$ that WW cost so I just switched.  I also find the information on MFP to suite my needs more than the points did on WW.

[wrongway]

I also use myfitnesspal because of the excellent food list but also for the report section that will break down your food choices in catogories such as iron,calcium,carbs, protein,fat vitamin C etc... and the red lines shows what you should be getting which also helps you choose your foods.

[starrzoo]

I think it is ridiculous that all the food is linked to a restaurant. When I cook at home I can't select anything because all the choices are restaurants - and none of them are in my area. SO frustrating. 

[Jessica1675]

How do you sync my fitness pal and fit it?

[CMichelle]

I found this link online.  Looks like you click on Connect, then log into your MyFitnessPal account.  Hopefully it directs you from there!

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/apps/show/30