Graham

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Notes on tracking what you eat.

Why calorie tracking turns into homework, what an AI can and can't tell you about a plate of food, and how Graham is built. RSS.

  1. Should you eat back your exercise calories?

    You went for a run, your watch says 450 calories, and your tracker is offering them back to you. Before you take them, it's worth knowing where your target came from.

  2. Raw or cooked — which weight do you log?

    You weighed the chicken, you found it in the database, you logged it. Whether that number is right depends on a word in the entry name you probably didn't read.

  3. Why the scale went up overnight when you did everything right

    You were careful all week and the scale is up two pounds this morning. Before you change anything about your plan, it's worth knowing what one reading can actually resolve.

  4. Tracking when you're eating with other people

    Someone cooked for you, and there's a small calculation running about when you're going to get your phone out. There's a better answer than either of the two you're choosing between.

  5. What to do with a day you didn't log

    It's Wednesday and Tuesday is empty. Everything people do about that — reconstruct it, write off the week, quietly stop opening the app — costs more than the gap itself does.

  6. Why your calories and your macros don't add up

    Multiply your macros by 4, 4 and 9 and you rarely get the number on the label. Most of the time the label is right and the arithmetic is the thing that's wrong.

  7. What to do when you don't know how big the portion was

    Every guide says weigh your food. None of them say what to do when someone else cooked, which is where most logs actually die.

  8. Why your calorie tracker made you quit

    You didn't quit because you were lazy, and you didn't quit because the math was hard. You quit because logging an ordinary dinner turned into data entry.