My new best friend: Paleo Track!!

Hold onto your hats for a big flipping news flash:

I like looking at things.

Ew, that sounds a bit lecherous. How about this:

I'm a visual learner.

Better, yes? I absorb information by seeing it. Could be text, could be a graph or even a photo (oh, what a stretch you might be saying) but this is the way I learn. For the past few weeks on my Primal journey I've been struggling to figure out more precisely how much I should be eating of each of the major macronutrient groups (fat, protein and carbs). I was browsing through some Paleo/Primal blogs and saw a reference to something called PaleoTrack.

At first glance PaleoTrack seems deceptively simple: track your food intake. I had been doing that in my daily food/exercise journal but so far they had really just been words on a virtual page. On a lark I decided to put in my previous day's food intake and suddenly I could "see" how my food choices were adding up.

Breakfast and lunch entered into PaleoTrack

Now for a visual learner like me this was a big deal! I could enter in my breakfast and lunch meals and see how much further I needed to eat (or not eat) to get to my macronutrient goals. Individual foods can be picked from a search/results drop-down menu. If you can't find a particular food you can easily add it in yourself with the information on the label.

Individual recipes listed for easy selection

But wait, it gets better! What if you're making a meal from scratch and it isn't listed? You can make a custom recipe entry listing all the ingredients and the number of servings it makes and you will get a nutrition label for a single serving portion as well as a tab to add it to your daily journal. What a great time saver, and if you're super hungry and have TWO servings of meatballs you can easily click that into your journal.

Now it is soooooo easy for my to see (and thus, understand) where my food requirements are either lacking or in a state of overage.

And on the subject of food requirements I had recently posted one of my day's food logs and how I arrived at those numbers over on my Facebook page for The Reluctant Primalist which I'll post here as well.

How do I get "those numbers" as targets for macronutrients? Here's my breakdown:

255 pounds today (down from 272!)
37.1% body fat = 94 pounds of fat, subtract from total weight =
160 pounds lean body mass (bone, muscles, stuff not fat) times
0.7g protein/pound of lean body mass (moderately active) =
112g of protein per day, only about 450 cal.

less than 75g carbs/day to stay in the fat-burning zone = 300 cal.

My numbers from today:
147g protein
71g carbs
1692 calories total

My meals:

Breakfast
3 slices bacon (baked earlier but warmed in pan to get a little fat)
2 fried eggs
coffee w/ whole milk

Lunch
big-ass salad of spinach greens, green onion, carrot, peppers, sunflower seeds, Italian infused macadamia nut oil & Balsalmic vinegar dressing and topped with a garlic stuffed olive
7.5 ounce can of canned red salmon (Alaska wild caught)
green tea w/ lemon

Snack
handful of trail mix: almonds, cashews, walnuts, macadamia nuts, raisins, 65% dark chocolate chips

Supper
brisket (OMG it was awesome) with mushrooms
broccoli w/ lemon dill butter

Evening
8 oz. glass of Merlot

Never hungry. And THAT is an awesome feeling.