To track or not to track...?

  I currently use Livestrong.com for my food and exercise tracking.  It's an incredibly powerful program, and even has apps which I can use on my ipad to track my progress and food, etc.  On one hand, I've had greatest success with weight loss tracking what I've eaten.  But the caveat is, I can't just track most of what I eat, I must track ALL of what I eat.

  This is hard.

 I mean, how do you live real life?  How do you tell yourself you'll track religiously all the time, and then when real life happens, and you realize it will take 25 minutes of cobbling together a recipe for something that's not in the database (because Livestrong doesn't personally know your grandmother, nor are they familiar with her gumpke recipe) how do you continue?  Do you fake some calories and move on?  Will you always remember that day that you "fudged" (oooooooh  fudge) the records?  How can you continue with utmost accuracy when you've already "fallen off the wagon"?

  So Livestrong is a short term for me.  I go at it for a couple weeks, then something like a festival where I work all weekend and eat questionable food at questionable times, or I drink too much Pino Grigio that I can't remember how many breadsticks I had, or if I stole some of Kevin's fries or not.  And then I lament how much I suck, and start again.

  But each time I feel less and less in control.  I feel like it's the tracking program telling me what to eat, not my stomach, not my head, not my heart.  How do we really learn this way?  Is there room for a weekend meal at the Himrod Eagle, complete with popped corn and a couple glasses of wine, in a lifestyle that doesn't warrant excursions from the every day?  If I had an answer for this, I'd probably not be 190-something....