How accurate does restaurant nutrition tracking need to be?

Consistent logging with approximate numbers outperforms precise logging that gets abandoned. A food log that is 70% accurate for three months produces more useful data than a perfect log kept for two weeks.

No, and this is worth sitting with. Restaurant nutrition estimates can be off by 30–50% and still be genuinely useful. If a dish is estimated at 600 calories but the real number is closer to 750, you're still building an accurate-enough picture of how you eat.

The most common reason people stop food logging is the belief that unless every gram is weighed exactly, the data is worthless. It is not.

The goal of tracking is building awareness of eating patterns over weeks and months, not measuring each meal to laboratory standard.