The CRON-O-Meter

[r-marie]

I have a similar problem as Karen in FL. But I have read the manual and still find that my eating habits are such that it takes forever to enter my food into the cron-o-meter because of the variety and lack of recipes. I tend to throw whatever I feel like and have on hand together.

Here is an example for breakfast this morning:
I poured about a cup of home made rice milk into a bowl and added a handful of oldfashioned oatmeal with 1 tsp full of ground flax seed.

While this was soaking...
I went to my garden and picked 2 okras off the stalks and ate them raw while gathering a small handful of blueberries.

Back inside I added the blueberries to the bowl with the soaked oatmeal, added some cubed papaya, 2 chopped walnuts and a handful of grapes.
That was my breakfast for today.

Now tomorrow morning, I may start out the same way with soaked oatmeal (or use cooked rice instead) but add half a chopped apple or maybe an orange and/or a small piece of banana.

In other words, it's never the same and the amount varies from day to day .

The same for lunch, I just combine different things. I love all kinds of salads - and their ingredients are NEVER the same.

That means I have to enter everything from scratch every day item by item... RIGHT? or is there indeed a simpler way?

I was wondering if I could save the foods somewhere, in the amounts I tend to eat, and then drag them into the new day - that would work.

I like to think I'm not the only one that has this problem. I've attempted 2 days so far and it took me forever because each day I had to look up the foods again and recalculate their amounts. So I stopped to see if I can eliminate the manual repeats.

Any help will be appreciated.

[momof4]

Along the top, there's a tab for "food." Click on that and you'll get a menu for Import Food, Create New Food, Create New Recipe. I've added info for some packaged foods in the Create New Food, and listed recipes in the Create New Recipe. Once that's done, they're easy to locate. Since recipes tend to be simple, and I don't add in all of the spices (except sodium), it's very easy to enter.

Hope that helps.

[bestfood]

Yes, so you can easily import. But back to my question--is there a database of inputs based on the McDougall cookbooks? That would greatly simplify usage (and would promote the cookbooks).

[r-marie]

thanks for your input momof4. I figured it out once I understood how "creating a recipe" and creating my own foods works and how it puts those 'customized' items into the general lineup to select later, as needed.

r-marie

[JeffN]

The newest version 9.5 was released.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cronometer/

In Health
Jeff

[bigdorkpeter]

The new version stayed on the (running) splash screen after throwing a Java exception. This was on CentOS 5.2 with Java SE 1.6. Deleting the configuration directory, ~/.cronometer, didn't solve the problem.

(I'm actually a Linux SA and know Java but I'm too lazy to look into it, at least right now. Maybe I'll submit a bug report. I just wanted to warn any Linux users out there.)

--Peter

[funcrunch]

This is a great resource, thanks for the pointer to it!

[JeffN]

Selenium
http://drmcdougall.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6500

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=13556

Vitamin E
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=6732

Zinc
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=11021

In Health
Jeff

[Essensia]

Wow. It's truly astonishing to see the nutrients I'm getting on the McDougall plan...as well as the nutrients I wasn't getting previously. No wonder I feel so much better after just a week and a half. Jeff, thanks for recommending this great resource and for all the information you have provide here, which I'm devouring like I used to devour McNuggets.

[ETeSelle]

So Jeff -- Is the calcium amount the Cron-o-meter uses correct? You said something above about possibly tweaking that and that you would address it in future. I do try to eat leafy greens (spinach/kale/collards/turnips) as often as possible but the last 2 days I did not and I am WAY under their recommended calcium. Should I just not worry if it's 2/7 days and the rest it's OK or closer to OK? Or should I tweak the requirements?

Thanks! This is kinda fun, LOL!

[bettina]

I have noticed the same thing. My calcium varies quite a bit depending on the green I eat. Bok choi always brings it up, but I don't like it every day. I thought it all balances out in the end?

bettina

[JeffN]

So Jeff -- Is the calcium amount the Cron-o-meter uses correct? You said something above about possibly tweaking that and that you would address it in future. I do try to eat leafy greens (spinach/kale/collards/turnips) as often as possible but the last 2 days I did not and I am WAY under their recommended calcium. Should I just not worry if it's 2/7 days and the rest it's OK or closer to OK? Or should I tweak the requirements?

Thanks! This is kinda fun, LOL!

You can change the minimum to 750 as that is a level that has been shown to be adequate

In Heath
Jeff

[ETeSelle]

OK -- thanks! I'm only getting 250-350 mg, though, on the days when I do not eat tons of calcium-rich greens. Should I not worry about that (it will get made up on the days when I do eat them) or must I make more of a point of eating them every single day?

Also . . .I'm kind of amazed by how few calories I seem to be taking in. I have more or less stopped losing weight at current weight so this seems to be the right amount of food for me . . . but the Cron-o-meter thinks I should be eating about twice as much. ???

[bettina]

Is 750 mg calcium o.k. for post menopausal women as well?
Would recommended daily allowances not vary depending on the persons size? How can a 100 lbs person need the same amount as a 200 lbs person?
thanks

bettina

[JeffN]

There are many many factors that effect calcium balance so there is never a simple single answer. Realize that some cultures throughout the world get in as little 350-500 mgs/day and have no problems.

In Health
Jeff

Am J Clin Nutr February 2011 vol. 93 no. 2 442-445

Recalculation of the calcium requirement of adult men
BE Christopher Nordin and Howard A Morris

Abstract

Background: There is uncertainty about the calcium requirement with particular respect to age and sex differences and the calculation of skin calcium losses.

Objective: We calculated the calcium requirement of adult men from a homogenous set of calcium balances and a robust estimate of calcium loss through the skin.

Design: We reviewed available high-quality published calcium balances in men and retrieved 219 balances; we noted a fall in calcium absorption in individuals >60 y of age. Our analysis was confined to 157 men ≤59 y of age with intakes of ≤1100 mg Ca.

Results: The mean age of the men was 38 y (range: 17–59 y), and the mean duration of the balances was 107 d (9–480 d). We assumed skin calcium losses of 40 mg Ca/d on the basis of the calcium content of insensible water loss. There was a highly significant correlation between calcium intake and the net absorbed calcium (R2 = 0.59), but inspection and physiologic considerations led us to use the logarithmic transformation of intake, which yielded the equation Ca absorbed = 210 log Ca intake − 1135 mg Ca. The calcium intake at which urine calcium plus skin calcium losses were equal to the net absorbed calcium was rounded to 750 mg Ca as the requirement, which implied a recommended allowance of 900 mg Ca.

Conclusion: We conclude that the mean calcium requirement of adult men <60 y of age is 750 mg Ca/d, and the Recommended Dietary Allowance should be 900 mg Ca.