Discussion Board

PURPOSE
This thread will be an example use of the Cronometer (http://cronometer.com/). My main interest is to see in what ways my limited diet is deficient. For particular medical reasons, this is what I eat: http://anti-itisdiet.blogspot.com/2010/ ... i-eat.html

Katydid has graciously offered to help me through the complexities of using the Cronometer. I am a novice. Perhaps others will benefit from my questions and Katydid's comments.

THE DATA
I tracked my meals (which are very similar) for a few days and then estimated for a week, to show variety over time and to allow me to deal simply in "round cups."

OVERVIEW OF THE WEEK: 126 C of food!
21 meals (3x day, ignoring occasional midnight mini-meals)
6 cups of food per meal: 3 C starch, 1 C veg, and 2 C fruit.

STARCHES per week (63 C)
42 C of potatoes (brown, red, gold, white)
10 C of pumpkin
11 C of yams

VEGETABLES per week (21 C, probably an underestimate)
4 C of carrots
3 C of green beans
3 C of eggplant
2 C of broccoli
2 C of cauliflower
2 C of celery
2 C of turnip greens
1 C of garden, "sweet" peas
1 C of artichoke hearts
1 C of mushrooms

FRUITS per week (42 C, probably an underestimate)
14 C of black grapes
6 C of bananas
6 C of apples
6 C of cantaloupe
3 C of dried plums
3 C of avocado
2 C of tomatoes (canned, diced)
1 C of blueberries
1 C of cherries, frozen, pitted.

Katydid, what do I do now? Do I need to download a program or can I do this on the Cronometer website?

You can go online and register on the CRONometer website or you can download the free app from iTunes and use an iPad or iPhone. The CRONometer will sync between the apps and whatever you put on the computer will show up on the app and vise versa. Once you have registered you can adjust the nutritional requirements as you see fit. So you want to make sure you get a minimum of 1500 calories and 50 grams of protein, you can tell the CRONometer that and it will adjust the requirements to remember this.

Then you start to enter the day's (not the week's food). This takes some guesswork as to say, what constitutes small, medium and large or how many cups or oz or grams. A kitchen scale is helpful here.

Say for example, I had a sweet potato and an apple microwaved together for breakfast. I would click on add food and search for 'sweet potato' and select 'sweet potato, baked, with skin, no-salt added' I would be given an option of small, medium, large, grams or cups. If I select medium, it would be added to my food list and the cells containing all the available nutritional information. I would then repeat for apple with skin. And so on. At the end of the day I would get a summation of all the day's nutritional information. Try adding today's breakfast and lunch and let me know how it goes.

Kate

Done. The process is slow, but I can see that it would be much faster with practice.

For the two meals, the most relevant items probably are:
1240 kcal
21 g fat
..... Omega 3: 0.4 g
..... Omega 6: 2.5 g
24 g protein
Very low in calcium, sodium (I use no salt), and selenium.
Of course, no vitamins B12 and D.

I am exceeding or close to target on the other requirements.

Problems:
- Can I edit a food entry once I have selected it? Or must I delete it and replace it?
- How do I save? I don't see any button.
- I don't see a print command button. I went ahead and used a general print command: two pages.
- How do I reverse the process: How can I find foods that are high in, for example, selenium?

I don't think you can do a backwards search for a specific nutrient on the CRONometer, but you can search for a specific nutrient HERE:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/tools/nutrient-search

Using this tool I was able to round out the selenium and vitamin E deficiencies in my diet with a single brazil nut and 1 tbs of raw sunflower seeds. I also used it to screen greens to find those with the highest calcium. I don't know if your specific diet allows you to eat raw nuts or seeds, but the search will list foods in order of concentration so you should be able to find something that fits your dietary needs.

You can edit OR delete your Cronometer entries. If you click on the amount box you can change the number of servings. If click on the unit box you can change the size of the item from say medium to large. If you click on the whole line, a delete icon comes up you can delete the line.

Saving is automatic, and the data are saved by date. If you go back the next day, the data will appear to be gone, but that's just because the calendar will have advanced a day.

Kate

Thank you!