A PaleoTrack Warning

I love PaleoTrack.  It's great for when you're sick of SparkPeople or FitDay whining that you're eating too much fat and not enough carbs, and it'll even remind you of whether you are grain free, dairy free, and so on.

There are a couple of things that can be confusing, though, and I thought I'd draw your attention to them because I've seen multiple people  have these problems without really seeing what was going on.

The first and simplest is to make sure you have your time zone correct.  Foods I was adding were magically disappearing on me, and it turned out that my "today" was the program's "tomorrow" based on my time zone settings.

But that's not a big deal.  This next one, though, is.  A couple days ago I ate ten ounces of pork.  When it gave me the amounts, it didn't give an option for ounces, only chunks of three ounces.  So I put the number as 3.33 as a quick estimate and clicked "Add to journal."

It converted the amount to 9.99 ounces, which was sufficiently close, and so I didn't think anything further of it.

I added the rest of my food for the day and then found I had added the wrong number of beets to the wrong day (based on the problem above).  So I clicked the "Edit" button to change the beets.  When I clicked "Save," it said I had gotten over 3500 calories.  Which confused me because I had reduced the number of beets I'd eaten, and beets aren't that caloric anyway.

I actually wound up doing this multiple times, and the calorie count ballooned to around 23,000.  Finally I looked at the amounts to find that it thought I'd eaten almost 270 ounces of pork, 27 times what I actually did.

What happened?  Well, whenever you click "Edit," it reverts back to chunks of three ounces instead of the ounces it converts itself to.  What it doesn't do is recalculate the number.  So whenever you click "Edit," and don't bother making sure all of them are accurate, it'll multiply the number it calculated from your original entry by three ounces.

So if you start by adding 3.33 to signify around ten ounces, it'll multiply that to about 9.99.  Next time you edit you wind up with a little under thirty.  And so on.

Maybe this'll be fixed in the future, maybe it won't.  PaleoTrack is a great program, but you need to be careful with it.