Incorporating all the current health buzzwords in your diet doesn’t necessarily mean you are eating healthy:

 

Tom Fishburne (aka Marketoonist) explains:

It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer. How consumers define what it means to be “healthy” is in flux. As a food marketing friend pointed out, consumers are increasingly prioritizing food purity over calorie count.

Chipotle is the poster brand for the current state of health positioning. They’re taking a leadership role in progressive stances like GMO-free and sustainable sourcing. And this obscures the fact that an average meal at Chipotle packs a whopping 1,070 calories, close to a full day’s worth of salt, and 75% of a day’s worth of saturated fat. A Chipotle burrito has more than double the calories, cholesterol, and grams of fat than a Taco Bell Supreme Beef Burrito.

It’s similar to soda makers that tout being “made with real cane sugar” or granola bars that are really glorified candy bars. There’s an aura of health that distracts from the actual nutritional picture. Researchers refer to this as a “health halo.”

Maybe the biscuits and gravy I ate for breakfast yesterday weren’t so bad after all!

According to Wikipedia,

The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging. Other names for using self-tracking data to improve daily functioning are “self-tracking”, “auto-analytics”, “body hacking” and “self-quantifying”.

Without realizing I was becoming part of such a movement, I began using the Fitbit tracker device a while ago.  It is an integral part of tracking my daily activity for my Yellow Jeep weight loss project.

This week, I decided to replace the abysmal Fitbit calorie tracking capability with MyFitnessPal  which has a far more comprehensive database of food types.  It turns out that Fitbit works well as an a input to the MyFitnessPal site via a published API.  My basic setup is shown below.

I continue to carry my Fitbit device everywhere I go.  it syncs with the Fitbit iPhone app, which passes the information to the Fitbit website, which in turn passes the amount of calories measured by the Fitbit device to the MyFitnessPal app.  

I record my food and water intake in the MyFitnessPal iPhone app, which updates the MyFitnessPal database in the cloud.  The iPhone app also retrieves the calorie information that came from Fitbit and displays the calorie intake minus exercise output on my phone.

It is a fairly simple process, but seems to work well.  Stay tuned for some thoughts about addressing the larger Quantified Self puzzle.