Calories Tracking

Don't you love it when a person's blog contains information that absolutely nobody apart from the individual themselves would find interesting?

Well, that's this blog. In my previous weeknote I noted how I need to start getting my diet sorted so that I can actually maybe lose a bit of weight.

Well, I made a bit of a diet tracker in Excel, which I'll detail below how it works, but long and the short of it a score is assigned to each day. That's something I've wanted to have for a while, and also this will of course help with the old weight loss. So I'm going to try use it and upload the scores, or maybe the deficits or something? to the website.

It will be here ... link to diet stuff.

How the Excel works

Each day I'll input the food, and I input the Carbs, Protein, Fats, and Fibre macros for each item, as well as a "Good" or "Bad" rating (important later!). This rating is meant to dissuade me a little from eating heavily processed food that might be missing micronutrients etc. I'm counting things like protein powder as good, though, and things like bread, or sweets etc as bad. It's a bit arbitrary but hopefully you can see the logic.

The calories get calculated using (4 x protein) + (4 x carbs) + (9 x fats).

Then the total calories, fibre and protein are summed for each day. I also calculate the percentage of my calories that come from Protein, and those that come from Bad foods.

My caloric needs are calculated using the Mifflin-St Jeor calculation [(10 x weight kg) + (6.25 x height cm) - (5 x age years) + 5] (or -161 if you are female) with an adjustment for activity (something like 1.2 x if I am inactive, more like 1.6x if I am very active) and then the deficit I want. Whilst my ankle is broken that'll be about 200, but once its healed I'll knock it up to 500 or 600 (giving me about 1 lb per week of weight loss, and yes I am mixing metric and imperial because I live in britain).

The protein target is chosen by the greater of 30% of my calories calculated above or 1.8g/kg. Both are a bit arbitrary, but gives me something like 140g per day of protein as the target, which is on the higher side but perfectly reasonable.

Then, I calculate a score using four metrics:

• Calories: between 90% and 105% of my target the score is 4. Outside of those

bounds it drops off until 0.65%

The protein target is chosen by the greater of 30% of my calories calculated above or 1.8g/kg. Both are a bit arbitrary, but gives me something like 140g per day of protein as the target, which is on the higher side but perfectly reasonable.

The protein target is chosen by the greater of 30% of my calories calculated above or 1.8g/kg. Both are a bit arbitrary, but gives me something like 140g per day of protein as the target, which is on the higher side but perfectly reasonable.

The scores are calculated using four parts. Calories, Protein, Fibre, and the Bad Food Penalty:

• Calories: between 90% and 105% of my target I get a 4. Outside of that the

score drops off linearly until we get to a 0 at either 65% or 140% of the target.

• Protein: the score goes down as you have less than the target but caps

out at 4 points for achieving the target, nothing more earns you points.

• Fibre: increases until 40g at which point you've earn the maximum of 2 points.
• Bad Food Penalty: the Calories (4), Protein (4) and Fibre (2) could give up to

10 points. However the bad food penalty docks up to 3 points based on the percentage of calories that came from Bad food. if 100% of calories were bad, 3 points are docked. If 50% of calories were bad, 1.5 points are docked. This is my incentive to eat lots of good food, fruits, etc.

And that's about it! I'll try to get as high of points as I can, of course nights out etc permitting!