Thursday, April 28, 2005
ufo
First, yes, I know there are actually twelve pyramids now. Well, NOW I know that. That's what I get for taking an AOL-linked article at face value. Anyway, I've been doing this Self challenge thing, and I wanted to keep track of my nutrient intake. Self's challenge log has a food diary, but it doesn't tell you calories, vitamin C, whatever, you just write down what you ate and that's that.
So I started using My Pyramid Tracker, in which you select the food you ate from a sort of drop-down menu, and at the end of the day you can see how your intake stacked up against your specific pyramid recommendations. Yeah, that lasted two days. There are a few problems with it: 1) they have some brand-name foods, but not others (Sprite but not Sierra Mist, for instance); 2) you can't go back to the previous day and enter additional info, or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it; 3) they don't list, like, "bran muffin," but they do list "McD's Apple Bran Muffin," which is okay if you just want to figure out rough substitutions, but is a little bit of a pain. Also, there's no way to freeform an entry, like, enter something not on the list and type in the nutritional info. So after two days of that I gave up on it and am just using Self's food diary.
However, I'm sure I could just pick one random previous day from the food diary, enter it all in the Pyramid Tracker, and see how your day stacked up. So complicated. (Just call me Avril.)
So I started using My Pyramid Tracker, in which you select the food you ate from a sort of drop-down menu, and at the end of the day you can see how your intake stacked up against your specific pyramid recommendations. Yeah, that lasted two days. There are a few problems with it: 1) they have some brand-name foods, but not others (Sprite but not Sierra Mist, for instance); 2) you can't go back to the previous day and enter additional info, or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it; 3) they don't list, like, "bran muffin," but they do list "McD's Apple Bran Muffin," which is okay if you just want to figure out rough substitutions, but is a little bit of a pain. Also, there's no way to freeform an entry, like, enter something not on the list and type in the nutritional info. So after two days of that I gave up on it and am just using Self's food diary.
However, I'm sure I could just pick one random previous day from the food diary, enter it all in the Pyramid Tracker, and see how your day stacked up. So complicated. (Just call me Avril.)
