To see the big picture of our nutrition we use the nutrition diary, where you can log your meals of the day. To truly get the best insights, adding everything you ate and drank is essential. That means every snack, bite of candy, or even the leftovers you finish from your kids’ plates. It all contributes to your daily nutrition intake.
To make the beginning of food tracking easier, we’ve created a calculator which provides you with daily nutrient requirements. These are the values that you should strive to achieve (or in some cases stay below) every day. Yet, if you have some specific needs, you can easily adjust those in your profile settings.
By consistently tracking over some period of time, soon you will be able to see not only your daily achievements but also start to notice trends in your nutrition. While hitting your daily nutrition goals is important, what matters most is the long term pattern. For instance, if you fall short on you calcium intake one day, it should be of no concern if your long term average intake is still sufficient. Then with this big picture view in mind, you can set targets for yourself, make adjustments and learn from your past.
Let’s say you notice that for a prolonged period of time your iron intake is below the required level. You can take a look at products that contain high amount of iron, review your own meals with high iron content, and incorporate those into your diet more.
If you prepare your own meals, with a little bit of practice nutrition tracking should become quite easy and accurate for you. You already know the ingredients that are used in the cooking process, so we suggest you create recipes of the meals you are making. That way the next time you cook some meal again, logging it in your diary is quick and effortless.
For more detail, try to weigh most of the ingredients used. If, however, that is not possible, simply estimate the quantities used as best as you can. Was it a half of the rice package; did you use half of the amount of tomatoes you bought, and so on.
Remember to also account for how food changes during cooking: if you weigh ingredients like rice before cooking, log the uncooked weight, as the difference between uncooked and cooked weight can be considerable.
Regarding the packaged foods, the producers usually only show limited information on the nutrition labels. Nevertheless, you can use our barcode scanner or snap a picture of the package, and let our algorithm estimate any missing nutritional values for you.
If you like to frequently dine out, try to guess the components of your meal and add them to your diary, or simply choose a similar dish from our database.
As we talk about in our philosophy of tracking page, at the hearth of our approach is understanding that nutrition tracking is about approximation. Even the most diligent nutrition trackers will never be 100% accurate, and that is fine. However, by being as detailed as possible of the foods that you log, you can minimize the uncertainty.
Choose the tracking method that works best for you, and try it out. However, if you have any questions, check our our FAQ and feel free to contact us!