Calorie Trainer

Ingredient Serving Sizes

2009-01-11T22:56:00.004-06:00

Hot off the text editor, a pretty big feature: ingredients can now have multiple serving sizes!

The important thing to note here is that one of the serving sizes must be linked to the given nutritional info. Once you do that, the app will be able to calculate the nutritional info for any serving size!

The radio button denotes which serving size is linked to the filled out nutritional info.

So what's the benefit of having multiple serving sizes? You can choose them when creating recipes or meals.

Note the order that the serving sizes appear in the drop down list is the same as when you created the ingredient, and by default the first serving size is selected.

You can change the order of the serving sizes when creating/editing an ingredient by dragging the icon to the left of it.

Stay tuned, more to come!

Cheat Meals

2008-12-30T20:35:00.001-06:00

Had an unplanned cheat meal? No problem, Calorie Trainer can track that!

When you log a meal in the diet tracking section of the site, you can now add a cheat food to the meal. All you do is name it, then take your best guess at the calories and nutritional information. It will be added to your meal just like any other food, except now your meal will be marked as a "cheat meal."

One caveat to be aware of is that since you don't enter a quantity with the cheat food, the meal's quantity measurement will be off. Behind the scenes, it counts each cheat food as 1 gram. That's fine for now since no calculations are done off a meal's quantity, but still it's something I'd like to fix in the future.

Happy dieting!

We're live! ...sorta.

2008-12-30T16:30:00.001-06:00

Hello!

Well, the site is live and on the internet, though it's not publicly announced. It's really not ready for public consumption, but if you've stumbled up this, here's this lowdown.

http://www.calorietrainer.com

The site is in pre-alpha. Don't expect everything to work and do expect things to change very rapidly without warning. Here is a list of features that work (but aren't necessarily complete).

Ingredients
Recipes
Meal Tracking

Ingredients

Ingredients must have their serving size (weight) and nutritional information filled out. Their alternate serving size is optional but very helpful. For example, if you create an ingredient with serving size of "30 grams" and alternate serving size of "1 scoop", then when viewing the ingredient, the serving size will read "30 grams (1 scoop)".

Recipes

Recipes are made up of portions of ingredients. For instance, a recipe might look like...

4 oz of cooked chicken
15 g of bbq sauce

You have to give an exact portion size in weight, but you can also give an alternate portion size, so the recipe will read like...

4 oz (2/3 breast) of cooked chicken
15 g (1 tbsp) of bbq sauce

Meals

Like recipes, meals consist of portions of ingredients/recipes. So you can say stuff like "I ate 5 oz of bbq chicken" or "I ate one serving of almond butter."

Parting Thoughts

Using the word "weight" all the time is somewhat incorrect. Ounce is a unit of weight. Gram is a unit of mass. Silly technicalities, but I think you all know what I mean.

The site is basically a proof of concept now. I understand it's extremely rough around the edges. I also understand that parts of it are confusing and unintuitive. I am working very hard to fix all that.

Please subscribe to this blog. I will post here when I add a new feature or fix a major bug.

Thank you!