PaleoTrack Analysis for May 29th

Alright, time for yesterday's PaleoTrack Analysis:

What I Ate And Why

I worked today, and miraculously it didn't harm my food intake that much:

 The list isn't all that accurate, but I'm going to assume it's accurate enough to not throw me off entirely.

For breakfast I had two rashers of bacon and two eggs fried in a little of the leftover grease, which is normal for me.  For lunch I had haddock cooked in coconut oil.  For dinner, which I ate at work, I had two chicken thighs with the skin.

For a throughout-the-day snack I made a trail mix with jerky (made from a grass-fed strip steak, this is where the "maybe not so accurate" thing comes up), home-dried bananas (another one) and a quarter cup of pecans.

There was no strange reason for eating any of this today.  I ate when I got hungry.  That part is a success for me.

The Pie Chart

Pie chart today is pretty damned good:

I didn't eat as many calories as I wanted, but it's not a huge deficiency and I'm not hungry.  My carbs are in a good spot at 31g.

The Labels

Hey, I gained one!

 No dairy today.  It's still ragging at me because of my omega-6 fatty acids, but I figured out they're high because of all the chicken I've been eating.  The skin has lots of omega-6s.  The pecans didn't help, but I wouldn't have gone over had it not been for the chicken.  And let's be honest, I'm not going to fret over chicken skin.

I went shopping today and brought back pork, lamb, eggs, and avocados.  So perhaps I will moderate the chicken better and I'll eventually get a magic "Strict Paleo" gold star there.  Not today, I'm afraid.

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.

PaleoTrack Analysis for May 28

The Foods I Ate And Why I Ate Them

Yesterday I was at home all day, which means I was less hungry in general due to less boredom.

I had eggs and bacon for breakfast before doing a coconut oil "pull and swallow" (Oil pulling, except I swallow the oil.  I know, I know, the oil pulling shills hate me now.).  I had a pair of chicken thighs each for lunch and a late dinner.  I also had a 6 oz. haddock fillet and a pound of broccoli with butter.

Later as the day was winding down I noticed my bananas were going bad.  I put some in the dehydrator and made the remaining two into a banana pudding, hence the bananas, coconut water, and cocoa.  This radically changed the way the day was going, but not so much that it ruined the day.

Plus, I didn't eat anything that I didn't process myself, and since I was at home and not work it meant I wasn't distracted by other people eating or boredom.

The Pie Chart

Yesterday's pie chart wasn't terrible:

I didn't get under the 70 grams of carbs I intended because bananas are sugary, but I'm still in the 50-100 carb sweet spot popularized by Mark Sisson so I am satisfied.  I also kicked myself out of ketosis, but my body drifts in and out very easily so I'll probably be back into it by morning.

Half of my calories are from fat, which is acceptable, and I ate pretty much the same amount of protein as the day before.

The Labels

There is no difference here from my last entry:

Too many omega-6s, loss of the "dairy free" label due to butter (but only butter).  Not bad.  Still room for improvement.

Exercise for the Day

Today's activities included playing fetch with the dog, foraging for asparagus (without actually finding any), and a fifteen minute Men's Health body weight workout video that gets me really sweating. 

PaleoTrack Analysis of the Day

Or rather, yesterday.  I am going to log everything I eat until at least my next bloodwork appointment.  I am using PaleoTrack to analyze each day of food, and I'll reflect on why I eat the way I do when I do screw up, goals for the future, etcetera.

The Foods and Why I Ate Them

Yesterday I actually packed out all my food, or what was supposed to be all my food.  This is due to the fact that every once in a while I'll pick up a twelve to fifteen hour shift at the group home I work at, and although I am allowed to eat the food I cook for my residents, it is very non-primal.

The star here was ten ounces of pork steak cooked in lard.  I also ate two eggs and a piece of bacon before I left, hoping to stave off the fake hunger pangs (those "I think I'm hungry" feelings that aren't actually hunger, but drug side-effects and boredom).  I brought along two pieces of bacon, three boiled eggs (they're labeled as "poached" here because I couldn't find "boiled" at the time), a bag of frozen broccoli, butter for the broccoli, an apple, an ounce of cheese.

I forgot to put on the list that I had a cup of French onion soup while I was there, but that had no carbs and only 20 calories so I'm not worried, although I'm annoyed that I ate something out of a box.  The soup was pure boredom eating.  The rest of my food was more than enough for the day, but I ate it early despite telling myself I shouldn't, finishing it all at around 3:30p.  Since my shift ended at 10p, it was rather annoying, but again, I survived, so no big deal.

The chicken was a last-minute addition.  I'd planned not to eat anything when I got home at 10:30, but I was legitimately hungry, so it's cool.

The Pie Chart

The pie chart on PaleoTrack gives a run-down of where my calories come from:

And I did eat more calories than I wish I did, but I did manage a reasonable level of carbohydrate (I'm aiming for under 70 grams) and the percentage of fat and protein is also pretty good.  Overall this was a success.

The Labels

PaleoTrack tells you, based on what labels are on the food you entered (contains dairy, contains grain, etc.) just how paleo your day was.  I'm not strict paleo anyway, so it's not a huge concern to me, but it is a good motivator.

Sugar-free, legume-free, and grain-free.  I did eat dairy today, so that's not on there.  I honestly don't know how to eat to get rid of the omega-6 label without cutting the fat off my meat (which I'm not going to do).  My Omega-6 ratio is around 7:1, which is a huge improvement compared to most Americans.  It's not a major concern to me although I will continue to try improving it further.