Tracking your progress - Diet, improved

Improved usability and calorie planning
June 21, 2023 by
Tracking your progress - Diet, improved
Tamás Tóth
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The advantage of having your own Google Sheets document for diet tracking is that you can improve it along the way and Sheets/Excel are quite powerful.



The attached image is the improved version 6 months into the diet:
1. Added Calorie and Macro calculator at the top (Hungarian, so HA=IF, KEREKíTÉS=ROUND), so I have step on the scale in the morning and make the left part up to date, then it automatically recalculates the limits and the thresholds divided up to the 3 meals.
2. Added a separate part on top for workout supplements, mostly to track the intake, the nutrition contents are not tat significant, except I did want to track everything down to the 1/100 of a gram. 😁
3. Added food selector to every row, so I had a separate Sheet which had these listed and you can even start typing and it filters the list, then you choose one and it gets the rest of the row field with the related data. Previously I was copy-pasting, that works too, but if you can automate it, why not.
4. Thresholds per meal and differences calculated, because I rarely planned out my day beforehand and on a lot of occasions ended up with a lunch where I needed to consume 70g fat, 0 CH, 10g protein... now try to come up with a healthy option with those numbers that you wouldn't be disgusted. I was crazy enough to eat tea butter by itself, for the sake of matching the macros for the day as close as possible. It also helps you keep in mind next day to plan ahead... so added thresholds with orange and red highlights to warn myself.

I was 105kg at the time, aiming for a -15% calorie level under BMR while still adding a workout as well which would also use 10-20% more calories, so a total deficit around 30%. In the second half I also bought an elliptical machine and added then over all the calorie cut and workout, some days cutting under BMR by 1000kcal. It took 2.5 more months to get to 90kg.

Notes: I have translated most of the labels, but because of the food selector, I couldn't change the food names, so the breakfast was a CH reduced bread with scrambled eggs, bacon and mixed pickles; snack before lunch: pork crackling (I don't know the exact translation, it's pork skin with fat and meat deep fried, totally healthy!), cucumber. Lunch: CH reduced bread sandwich with salami, cheese, tomato. Dinner: regular bread, salami, tea butter. I did like to eat these. Totally unhealthy. 😅

Yes, losing a lot of weight with eggs, bacon, salami and tea butter.. 9 out of 10 people won't believe it.. how do you lose fat by eating mostly fat?!..
Calories in < Calories out. Eat less, move more. 👨‍🎓

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