At the behest of the clinician at the bariatric clinic I have begun to track all of the food and fluids I take in.
After doing this for two days, I have some observations to share. First and foremost, it’s not an easy task, despite the presence of technology and people who anticipated a need. Ideally, it should be as easy as searching for and selecting an item from a list. The trouble is, it isn’t really all that simple.
I’m using two apps for this at the moment.
The first, One Drop, is the app I use to monitor my blood glucose. Being able to use this app for both my blood glucose monitoring and my food intake is my ideal situation. Unfortunately, One Drop does not appear to have been designed to address all of the metrics the clinician has requested. From a food perspective, One Drop’s focus is on carbohydrates, because of the strong relationship between carbohydrate intake and blood glucose. But the good news here is One Drop sends data to Apple Health, including data One Drop doesn’t appear to consume. There’s no way to add data to One Drop’s food database, but you can store foods and food combinations (think coffee + creamer) locally and access them quickly.
The second is My Fitness Pal, the app recommended by the bariatric clinic. My Fitness Pal seems more built for the purpose of tracking food consumption and reporting on multiple dimensions (calories, sodium, et cetera). Using this app would probably give me a more accurate picture of my intake. Like One Drop, My Fitness Pal reports its data to Apple Health. It just reports much more nutrition-oriented data than does One Drop.
In addition to reporting their data to Apple Health, these apps are also alike in that you’re confined to making specific choices in order to record your intake, and those limited choices jeopardize the accuracy of your record.
Let’s say your love has made tacos for dinner using small, extra thin shells, and homemade guacamole and homemade salsa. If you went with a standard taco — say, a hard shell taco from Taco Bell, the numbers are going to be off because those shells are larger and thicker. But you can’t figure out what you actually consumed with any accuracy at all, so you end up going with the Taco Bell estimate.
Suppose you went to a place where you build your own meal, like a Chipotle or Qdoba. I can be a good boy and order my burrito bowl with very little rice, but there’s nowhere in either app where I can account for it accurately.
I even got yelled at by the My Fitness Pal app for having exceeded the amount of fat I was supposed to have in my diet today. I know damn well I didn’t exceed anything.
By the way, the nutrition database that One Drop uses seems very tightly controlled. If there’s an entry for a particular item, there will be only one entry for it. Not so with My Fitness Pal. MFP’s database seems to allow — or have allowed — for user contributions. I found several entries for some items I looked for.
Also, although the UIs seem similar for both apps, the units can differ. The other day I worked hard to figure out that I generally eat about 1/4 cup of dry roasted peanuts at a time, and was happily charting this in One Drop. My Fitness Pal has to be difficult about it, insisting measurement in… ounces, I think. This is a major source of frustration, by the way.
P.S. – I can now say with confidence that I use about 10 tbsp of creamer in my morning coffee. That’s 20g of the most delicious carbohydrate I get to see in a day. My Fitness Pal, you can have it when you can pry my cup from my cold, dead fingers.
So I’m two days into the food tracking exercise, and I’ve already seriously hit “eff it.” I am forced to accept that the whole point of tracking my intake is to make me aware of how much of certain elements are in the food I consume, and that the software will provide a general picture of those quantities at best.
Where I have the most trouble with accepting these generalizations because I have to compare and balance them against the precision that is blood glucose monitoring. Thankfully, I’m not on insulin; my medications simply help my body accept the insulin it already produces. The real key for me is in the change in diet. The idea behind the whole food monitoring thing IS a change in diet. So I should be acing this.
Instead, I’m ready to throw my phone because the software is unable to track to the precision required for a truthful result.
And OMG is it a pain in my neck.
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