Greg's Running Blog

It’s no secret that I have been tracking my calories since day one of my transformation very diligently and based on the results I’d say with great accuracy and success. When I started I was going to do a simple diet that was going to contain the same food every day. This would have meant no worries about counting calories, you set up the menu once then you keep eating the same thing over and over again until the cows come home. It is a great method to stay on track but it’s also a great method to fall off the wagon due to utter boredom with food. Just because I’m eating at a caloric deficit it doesn’t mean I didn’t want to eat a variety of foods and enjoy the occasional indulgences. And eating the sam thing day in day out is not something that can be sustained for a lifetime. So I had to use a different approach.

I knew if I wanted to eat a wide variety of food items I could not rely on memory and estimation alone to ensure that I’d say within my daily calorie allocation. I had to track it. Luckily there is an abundance of information and websites available on-line that help you with tracking your caloric use. There are even iPhone apps that will do it for you. Since I don’t have an iPhone that was not an option for me. The website choices are abundant, there are plenty of free ones and there are plenty of pay ones.

I have stumbled upon myfooddiary.com somehow and I found the site very intuitive and easy to use. It was relatively easy to use and had a great user interface. It also allowed me to add customized food items and recipes to my profile which was great as I could add all my wife’s home made recipes to it and still enjoy home cooked meals every once in a while once I figured out how many calories they contained. Myfooddiary.com is a pay site that charges $9/month for their service to keep track of your food items. They also have great charting features, progress reports and handy little smiley faces and frowns for things you ate during the day.

For example, if you start your day with a high fiber breakfast it rewards you with a smiley face for the day. But if you eat too much saturated fat you get a frown. It’s a great motivator but I’m not sure I agree with all the smileys and frowns. For example, if you eat a nice shrimp and veggie stir-fry with half a pound of shrimp you will end up getting a big fat frown for the day for going over the cholesterol limit. I think it’s stupid, there is no study that links food cholesterol to blood cholesterol, really. So go ahead, eat all those eggs, you’ll be fine. You also get a frown if you eat, what the software considers, too much protein. I have hit that wall on numerous occasions with some nice red frown faces. But the software simply follows the USDA recommended servings and ratios so I can’t really fault it for these minor things. All in all I was very happy with the way it tracked my calories.

But there was one thing with it that it simply did not do. There was no way for me to look up dates when I ate something last. This was frustrating because sometimes I was curious about when the last time was I had a cookie or when I had red meat last time. I couldn’t do it. I have asked their customer support about this feature and they told me it would not happen in the foreseeable future as their improvements are all planned out in advance and it’s not on the near future plan.

There is one other issue with these on-line tracking systems. If you quit paying your dues all your data goes bye-bye. So it seemed like I was on the hook forever, unless I was ready to give up my precious nutrition data that I oh so diligently logged into the system. They provided no means to back it up or export it.

So I started to look for alternatives, I was thinking about having some kind of web app running on my own server to log my food diary, it could not be all that hard to write something like this, but I hate to reinvent the wheel so I figured someone must have done it already. And I was right. There were open source web applications that already did calorie tracking on your own server with your own database. But they didn’t even come close to the detail and sophistication of myfooddiary.com. Then I finally found an open source app that actually does everything that myfooddiary does and then some!

Say hello to CRON-o-Meter. CRON-o-Meter is an open source multi-platform application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes pre-loaded with the entire USDA food database and you can add your own custom foods as you need them. It also does a heck of a lot better job with setting up portions for your food items. One of my major gripes with myfooddiary.com was that you could only set up one unit of measure for every food item and most foods should have more than one unit of measure. Sometimes I measure my veggies by the cup, sometimes I weigh it on the scale. Sometimes I want a tablespoon of flour, sometimes I want to use two cups of the stuff. With myfooddiary.com this was not possible. But CRON-o-Meter handles units just the way the USDA defines it which is awesome. So I have decided to give CRON-o-Meter a test run.

I’m happy to report that I have been using CRON-o-Meter for my nutritional tracking for a month now, and it works great! I can log all my food items the way I want to, I have built custom recipes with it and I can enter all my custom foods with different units of measurement. And best of all, it’s free! So what’s the catch then?

Well, the biggest issue was, how was I going to save my data from myfooddyary.com? Luckily they provide a daily detail page that lists all the food items for that day with nutrient breakdown in a tabulated format. I had to manually copy/paste every day into a spreadsheet but now I have extracted all my data for myself, stored on my home PC. I had to write some Excel macros to be able to convert and format the data but even with the over 1,500 items of food that I had consumed over my 4 month myfooddiary.com tenure it was a relatively painless task.

The only drawback to CRON-o-Meter is that it lacks the nice charts and statistical summaries that were present in myfooddiary. But since I’m only really interested in daily total calories and macronutrient distribution, I just copy those over into an Excel spreadsheet and I can produce the pretty charts myself. I have actually been doing that since the end of January so it wasn’t that big of a deal to keep doing it. Now, CRON-o-Meter still doesn’t provide a search feature in historical data, ie. the last time I had candy but I now keep a food diary in Excel that is just a copy of the daily food items from CRON-o-meter. And Excel allows a quick search of this data which is great. And this way all my data is mine, on my PC and I can data mine it all day long any way I want to.

This all might sound like a ton of work but it really isn’t. Once you get the system down, logging your calories really becomes second nature and takes hardly any time at all. And while I used to do every single meal as I consumed it, now I just enter them all in bulk as I’m getting pretty good at keeping a mental count of my daily calories. When you do it as long as I have been doing, you just look at a slice of whole wheat bread and you know that you’re looking at 100 calories worth of complex carbs with a couple grams of protein and fat.

Bottom line is, myfooddiary.com out, CRON-o-meter in! My monthly subscription on myfooddiary is expiring in 3 days and I’m certainly canceling it. It helped me tremendously but had I known about CRON-o-Meter from day one I would have just used it instead.