NourmioHow to log a college dining hall meal with incomplete nutrition data
Match the campus menu's serving to what you took. Two trays use University of Maryland nutrition cards to show how to report a known subtotal.
Look up the exact dish and the posted serving at your dining hall. Use that number if the serving matches what you ate, or scale it to your estimated amount. When an extra has no usable number, keep it separate from the calories you could account for.
Match the station sign to the right menu card
Start with the location, date and meal. Then check the item name and the serving unit. The University of Maryland dining site lets you narrow the menu by location, meal and day. Its numbers describe the listed standard servings.
The UMD card for Grilled Chicken lists 132 kcal per 4 oz. A different card called Grilled Chicken Breast gives 180 kcal per piece. Check the station’s exact item before you use either number. The second card gives the serving in pieces, without a weight in ounces.
Count a tray with matching portions
Suppose you took one 4 oz serving of the Grilled Chicken and one 4 oz serving of the Brown Rice on card 100329. The rice card lists 134 kcal. Add 132 and 134 for 266 kcal from the two posted servings. Both trays here are hypothetical and use the posted recipe cards. Use the menu for your own visit to see what was served.
Keep an unknown extra outside the subtotal
On a second tray, suppose the chicken still matches one posted serving, the rice looks like one and a half servings, and you added some dressing. For the same rice recipe, that means about 6 oz and 134 × 1.5 = 201 kcal. With the chicken, that’s about 333 kcal before dressing. The rice amount is a portion estimate.
Write down the dressing and mark its amount as unknown. If you later find the bottle label and can estimate what you used, add that amount. If the campus recipe already includes a dressing and you used only that serving, its posted value already accounts for it. Add a separate line for dressing you put on the tray yourself.
Save what you can check later
Keep the dish name and serving estimate with the entry. A photo can help you remember the tray, but it cannot recover a dressing amount you could not see or measure. See how to log a meal without weighing it for portion notes, or how to review a photo estimate before using one. In Nourmio you can enter the amounts you can support manually and edit the result when you have better information.