Nutrition Tracking, with Numbers

A Rant

“Numbers” as in the spreadsheet software that comes with MacOS, not like “the concept of amounts of things”. Although that obviously is relevant here too. But I just wanted to lead off by saying that calling your spreadsheet program the most generic thing in the world was a horrible decision for search engine interaction purposes. There’s no way to word any search for help in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re looking for Excel help for number datatypes. Try it. “SUMIF function conditions numbers”. That’s only ever going to pull Excel tutorials. The saving grace is that 95% of the time Excel commands/syntax do work in Numbers, or point me in enough of the right direction to get me unblocked.

Using Numbers For Tracking Diet

Anyway, I haven’t been running for several weeks because of a nagging pain in or around my left big toe that refused to go away. The intensity would ebb and flow and by and large I could complete runs normally, but it finally became bothersome enough that I decided I had to resolve it. I’m not sure if it’s a stress fracture or tendonitis or some other exotic form of damage, but I’m going to give it a month or two and see if that will let it heal. In the meantime I have started swimming and resumed lifting weights, but I am not a good enough swimmer to truly replicate the aerobic effort from the time I was spending running. I am worried about gaining too much weight in this extended period where my aerobic activity profiles so differently from what I’m used to, so I decided to track what I eat and use the detailed log for accountability and making informed choices. I’ve used MyFitnessPal in the past for this but didn’t like the idea of maintaining an account at another freemium-modeled venture-capital owned business and I wondered if the basic stuff I wanted to do could be easily done in a spreadsheet. As it turned out, kind of.

The basic idea I had was to take essentially the data on every “Nutrition Facts” panel and record that data for each thing that I ate. So that would be like a series of rows in a table, each with a date, the name of the food, and the nutrition information. Then I’d want a quick way to see how I’m doing during or at the end of each day, so I envisioned another table that would have a single entry per day summing all of the data from the first table. Then, because I was interested in my protein intake, I thought it would be nice to have a pie chart displaying the share of each “macro” (protein, fat, and carbs) in my diet. Finally, to make data entry easier I wanted to maintain a table where the nutrition facts for each food are stored; that way, on the first table all I need to do is choose the food (from a dropdown), enter the number of servings that I actually consumed, and then the data shown on the first table would just be computed values based on the canonical nutrition info data and the number of servings I entered.

Was this easy? It was surprisingly straightforward, none of it particularly stretched the limits of what spreadsheets can do. It was time-consuming for me because, being inexperienced with spreadsheets, I had to spend time looking at how to make a pie chart or how to use some of the functions used in the cells. But still it was only an hour or two and I feel like I have something pretty convenient and extendable. If I want to track other metrics later on I’ll easily be able to build some cool charts or graphs on the raw data I’m entering.

Here’s some pictures of the end result:

The table where I enter foods:

The table which gives a quick summary of each day:

The pie chart for macros. I’m particularly proud of being able to select a date range for the data that the chart will represent:

The table that stores the nutrition info for each food. This is the tedious thing to keep updating every time I eat something new, but I had to do a lot of that with MyFitnessPal too so it’s acceptable for now.