Tech Tip — MyNetDiary
Self-care and your overall health have to be a priority for every leader. If you’re not taking good care of yourself, you’ll be less able to support others. What you eat, when you eat, and how much you eat all factor into your overall well-being. Knowing what you ate and when then becomes a critical data point for you to have. The idea of food logging or food journaling has gained traction in the last several years as new applications have become available for use with phones and other digital devices. I have been logging my food intake off and on for at least the last five years and find it extremely useful. Food logging does not only need to be for people who are trying to lose weight, as it can be a helpful mechanism for your overall health considerations.
Usually, when I share Tech Tip ideas, I focus solely on the application itself and its features. For today’s topic, I think it is important to provide a little background on the idea of food tracking first. Then I’ll share an application I use for logging what I eat. Finally, we’ll connect it to the larger idea of habits and routines. Later this month, I will be sharing a three part series on habits as a way to plan ahead for the upcoming year. Let’s talk first about the benefits of food tracking.
The Benefits of Food Tracking
There are a multitude of reasons why tracking what you eat can be beneficial. As I mentioned above, it is not only about weight management, but that is a core benefit of food logging.
Weight Awareness I am calling this weight awareness because weight is highly subjective in many ways. You should be aware of your target weight range based on your height and age, then work with your doctor for the right approach to ensure you are within the range for your body. Keeping track of your food, though, can help you understand the impact of what you eat on your weight itself. Diet (what you eat) can have different effects on different people. We hear a lot about calories and carbohydrates, but the truth is it is not as easy as just managing one or the other. There are several factors involved. Knowing what you eat each day gives you insight into those factors.
Nutrition As critical, and maybe more so, is the nutritional value of what you’re eating. Food logging applications can do this automatically for you, so you get a better view of the macronutrients you are consuming each day. This will help you balance out your diet, so it works best for you.
Food Mindfulness I find this to be the highest value benefit of food logging. Simply capturing what I eat each day makes me aware of what I have consumed. This falls into “the what gets measured, gets noticed category.” It forces me to be aware of the choices I am making about the foods I eat throughout the day. As you combine this with other aspects of food journaling, they give you a more powerful process for managing how you feel.
Patterns Seeing what you eat and combining it with notes you make around your mood and general feelings can help build a better long-term diet plan for yourself. (Again, I use diet here as the menu of foods you eat versus dieting as in losing weight.) You may find that eating certain foods makes you feel differently. Drinking at different times can also have an effect. Knowing when to stop drinking caffeine for the day to not impact sleep can be useful for managing sleep habits as much as your food and beverage intake. You may be surprised how food can affect your mood and energy levels as well. If you have a big lunch, you may notice being tired in the afternoon. Or when you eat a lot of sugary snacks, your mood might swing as the sugar wears off later in the day. All of these can be seen through patterns of capturing what you eat and when.
Sharing Information Having a history of what you eat and when also be helpful in conversations with your doctors. Since most applications can connect to a bigger health ecosystem, you can capture a lot of data together to discuss with your doctors. MyNetDiary works on both the iOS and Android platforms, and for iOS users, it will synch data with the Health app to keep your trends and information all in one place.
Using MyNetDiary
The application I use for tracking my food intake is MyNetDiary. It is usually on the list of most common applications, but I have found it to be very well-rounded, easy to use, and has a nice interface to show the data it collects. MyFitnessPal and LoseIt are typically the more common apps you see mentioned. I have tried both, and each are very functional applications, just not quite as user-friendly in my mind as MyNetDiary. MyFitnessPal probably has the most complete listing of food of them all, but I rarely find items that cannot be tracked within MyNetDiary. Being able to get an accurate accounting of your food information is the core component of any of these applications.
MyNetDiary is available for use with your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch if you are in the Apple ecosystem. The app itself is available on the Google Play Store, which should allow usage on Android phones and tablets.
The application does offer a free as well as a Premium paid version. The annual cost is about $60 or $8.99 if you choose a monthly plan. The paid version provides you with access to a more tailored approach to viewing your macronutrients and recipe features. The free version is a great place to get started, and if you only want to track your food intake and not get too into the details, it is a great place to start. Compared to other similar apps, I think the value and overall cost of this app's premium features are better than almost all the others.
Logging Food
Logging food can be completed in several ways. Looking up items from the built-in list will be the most common way, but the application does allow you to set up your own receipts and meals. As you begin using the application, and you identify common foods and drinks you consume, setting those as favorites or as part of a meal will be a huge time saver for food entry. You can also use Siri Shortcuts, many of which are built in, to simply tell your phone what you ate, and MyNetDiary will log it for you.
Seeing Your Information
The Dashboard view is where you’ll start your review and capture of your foods. This gives you an overview of each meal, your key statistics, and what amounts you still have for the day. This is particularly helpful if you are completing your food logging throughout the day with each meal (recommended). You can see the calories, carbs, and other macronutrient impact based on the food you have eaten. This allows you to plan the remainder of the day, especially if you have unplanned meals or snacks. This is also a good way to understand how different foods or liquids add up while you’re getting started. The dashboard is designed to heighten awareness and point out where you may be able to make adjustments.
Your dashboard is highly customizable, both in the data it shows and further information the app is capable of tracking, like your weight or meal plans. You can choose from many options what you see and how it is displayed. There is a time investment here if you really want to dial in your view of your food statistics. Depending on your goals and needs for food logging, this can be extremely beneficial, or one that you can utilize the basic set up.
MyNetDiary is a comprehensive health application. It has excellent widget support for iOS devices. The newer iPad application provides a large screen view with many details that make it easy to keep track of your eating and drinking habits. There are plenty more details that I could go into on this application, but since it is so personalized, it may be best to download and explore for yourself. There is a free version to get started, then, as mentioned above, the pro plan gives you many more options and flexibility to truly incorporate this into your self-care and healthy eating routines.
Connecting this food tracking to the larger goal of building positive and sustainable habits and routines, logging your food will become a daily routine. As you complete a meal, capture it in your application. I set a reminder at the end of each day to ensure I have logged my food. Since I have moved beyond the need to know exactly where my macro readings are throughout the day, the most important element for me is to ensure I have the day logged. I tend to have a running tally of key measure in my head throughout the day as I eat many of the same things each week, especially for lunch. I do on occasion, though, track it carefully to see how that may impact other health reading such as glucose levels or ketones.
Regardless of when you enter your food log, it creates a routine of being aware of what you eat, how that makes you feel, and the impact it has on your body. That is tremendous information to have in order to make adjustments to eating patterns or types of food. You may realize that having that cookie at lunch makes you more irritable and tired in the afternoon (not speaking from experience, of course). Or if you eat a certain number of calories, you notice an impact on weight. This information really will allow you to build the lifestyle you want to lead and ensure you’re setting yourself up for personal and professional success.
Do you track your food intake each day? What benefits have you seen from it?
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