Journal: Foodnoms

site/journal/2024/Foodnoms.md

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+---
+title: Foodnoms
+subtitle: Actually consistently tracking my macros?!?
+
+date: 2024-10-22T20:42:00-0600
+
+tags:
+    - health
+    - fitness
+
+qualifiers:
+    audience: >
+        People who are open to the idea of using tools like apps to help manage their health and fitness.
+
+image: https://cdn.chriskrycho.com/images/foodnoms.png
+
+---
+
+Today I crossed an important personal milestone: more than three months of mostly-consistently tracking my food intake. This is the first time in a *very* long time I have managed this.
+
+In years past, I have *tried* to do this kind of thing using MyFitnessPal. For a while I even paid for the service. It never really improved, though, and never adjusted to account for obvious gaps—most notably, that anyone might have a goal besides losing weight. Some people need to gain weight, others to maintain weight. Some people are perfectly reasonably unconcerned about their weight but very concerned about how much iron or calcium their diet has. The list goes on. <abbr title="MyFitnessPal">MFP</abbr> never addressed any of that. They had a degree of market dominance and apparently just decided to sit on it and milk it.
+
+I successfully used it to lose some weight in the past, but I have always ended up giving up on actually using the app to help me sustain my weight or track macros: the subscription cost was too high for a janky app that wasn’t improving, and the ad-based experience was increasingly junk-tastic.
+
+My interest in tracking my food intake has not gone away, though. The more seriously I have taken my running, the more I have considered the importance of diet to help improve my performance. Although diet is not a make-or-break factor for most amateur athletes, eating well certainly helps. Too, the older I get the more I am aware of the importance of making decisions about my body that will sustain me to live the rest of my life well (and hopefully long!).
+
+Enter [Foodnoms][foodnoms]. I went looking for <abbr title="MyFitnessPal">MFP</abbr> alternatives a few months ago, and I believe someone mentioned it to me. I downloaded and installed it and was immediately delighted by it. It is a great native iOS and iPadOS app, and it has a Mac app as well.[^catalyst] It even works offline, at least at a basic level! Unlike <abbr title="MyFitnessPal">MFP</abbr>, it understands all sorts of different kinds of goals: macros, nutrient intake, gaining or losing or maintaining weight, and any combination of those you can think of. It makes it easy to build both recipes and meals (<abbr title="MyFitnessPal">MFP</abbr> can do that, but it was never easy), which then further saves time.
+
+Oh, and: unlike <abbr title="MyFitnessPal">MFP</abbr>, Foodnoms is the work of a single developer, [Ryan Ashcraft][ra]. He answers emails personally when you send feedback! It
+
+[foodnoms]: https://www.foodnoms.com
+[ra]: https://ryanashcraft.com
+
+Since I started using Foodnoms, in no small part *because* I started using it, I have:
+
+- Successfully shifted my macro balance to incorporate significantly more protein in the average day.
+
+- Been able to adjust the macros dynamically for different parts of my training season as appropriate—carb-loading the week and especially the day before a race, for example.
+
+- Lost the 5 pounds I have been trying to lose to hit a particularly optimal weight for my overall health and especially for my running.[^weight]
+
+- Cut my body fat by several percentage points.[^withings] The goal here was simply to shift the balance between fat and muscle toward muscle, since that is more helpful for running… and, frankly, for life. I have plenty of good fat, but I think shifting this balance has helped my running and overall feeling significantly.
+
+- *Avoided* losing *more* weight after my body went through a surprising metabolic shift in early September.[^shift]
+
+Critically, I have not given up or gotten frustrated using the app. To the contrary! I have logged *some* food on every single day since July 21. Even on my trip to <abbr title="New York City">NYC</abbr> for StaffPlus back in September, I did not manage to log everything, but I kept up the discipline of logging some things to help myself stay on track… and to avoid losing my streak, which the app helpfully shows if you drill into your “daily report”.[^streak]
+
+Net, Foodnoms has been exactly the app I needed to tackle the goals I have for this phase of life. If you have any need of an app in this space, give it a shot, and if you like it, subscribe. The world needs more apps like this: the handiwork of one craftsman using his tools well and serving a lot of people along the way.
+
+
+
+[^catalyst]: As far as I can tell, it is a [Catalyst][catalyst] app, and to be honest it is not very good app on the Mac. But it *exists* on the Mac. These days that is rare.
+
+[catalyst]: https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/
+
+
+[^weight]: I feel—and, in my own opinion, look!—better than I have at any point in my entire life, without exaggeration, including even the parts of my life I have been in my best shape before.
+
+[^withings]: I use a [Withings][withings] scale, and while I don’t put an enormous amount of stock in its specific values or the day-to-day variations, I *do* think the trajectories it reports are usefully indicative.
+
+[withings]: https://www.withings.com
+
+[^shift]: I think I basically kicked my body into a new mode by way of accidentally doing a bunch of intermittent fasting when I went to New York for StaffPlus. I did not eat a normal lunch even once that week; I did “depletion runs”—running before eating anything—every single day I was there; and most days I had a relatively small breakfast and then a very large dinner. It was not a way I prefer to live. It was an interesting accidental experiment, though, and it definitely seems to have “done the trick” on helping me hit some target weights.
+
+    Notably, I did not lose weight while I was there in that mode, but—unusually for me with travel—I also did not *gain* any weight, and when I came home and resumed eating normally, I started dropping weight rapidly. I had to substantially increase my food intake to stabilize after that. It was an odd experience, after years of fighting not to gain weight!
+
+[^streak]: I might like it if a streak could be intentionally paused to handle things like travel—maybe ahead of time to avoid “cheating”?