Thursday, March 28, 2013

Wrote myself a calorie tracker/counter

So after vetting the popular calorie counters on the market today such as myfitnesspal.com and fatsecret.com I decided that they just did not meet my goals so I spent part of a day whipping up my own calorie counter.
The two main things I need it to do that I was not getting from the pre-existing offerings I researched is:

  1. let me enter in weight of food I am about to eat (instead of forcing me to figure out how many "servings" I am about to eat which is a complete joke in my opinion)
  2. show me my total protein consumed for the day next to the total calories

I own a food scale and it is super handy to just throw the food I am about to eat on the scale and see how much it weighs.  I don't want to waste time trying to figure out how many "servings" I am about to eat.  What a pain.  Apparently, I am one of the few people who actually finds using a food scale to be a convenience.

Also, since I tend to be skinny and am a male, losing weight really isn't a goal of mine; losing fat is my goal.  So I need to make sure I am eating a lot of protein in my diet to make sure I am not losing muscle instead of fat, especially if I am exercising.  This is another area where the pre-existing tools out there fail miserably (by assuming that calories are the only thing I care about).

Anyway, it took me less than a day and my calorie tracker is done.  Here are the two pages it has:

Main daily summary page

 Simple page to add/edit food consumed

2 comments:

  1. Nice. Being that I also tend to be skinny, and also have a goal to retain/gain muscle and lose fat, I'm very interested in your results. And now I wish my phone had a small food scale built into it.. ;)

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  2. Matt, have you tried http://www.tweakeats.com?

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