Tracking in Cronometer

Tracking your food is the best way to understand what you’re eating, the nutrients that you are getting or lacking, managing your health goals, and understanding exactly what you need for your individual needs. This first week we want you to start inputting your food into cronometer without worrying about hitting any numbers. Get used to tracking, get used to the app. There’s so much data such as your micronutrients, trends, reports, your overall food diary, (where you log all your meals and snacks) and the explore dashboard which shows you a breakdown of calories, macronutrients and micronutrients. 

When you start entering your first meal, you can search for the food with the search bar or you can use the barcode scanner then you just adjust the serving size making sure that you have the right unit of measurement (such as grams or ounces), and then just add it to your diary.

We want you to get used to weighing your food for accurate tracking so using the food scale is going to help you better understand portion sizes, and to ensure that the entries into cronometer are accurate. By weighing out your food, it eventually gives you the ability to estimate your portions  if you can’t weigh your food. 

You can also save different meals so that logging that same meal on other days is easier.

As you log your food, you’ll also be able to see the detailed micronutrient tracking, so you’ll notice not only the calories and the macronutrients, but also vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. This is where we want to utilize this tool to eventually look into certain vitamins and minerals that may be low and later use this information to adjust your intakes to fill those nutrient gaps.

You’ll notice after a week or two of tracking that you can review trends and you can adjust your nutrition intake accordingly. For example, if you notice that you consistently have low fiber, you can focus on incorporating more fiber rich foods into your daily intake. 

This week we don’t want you to strive for perfection, we want you to just think of Week 1 as a learning opportunity to understand tracking and see firsthand how it can be helpful for you to know exactly what you’re eating.