Fat to Fit Blog Hop Thursday: Journaling In Better Nutrition...can get tricky!

As my regular readers know, I got back to Sparking, which include using the SparkPeople Nutrition Tracker (a lovely online tool for food journaling). I have found it really useful, not just to track food, but to track holes in my nutrition, since it tells you as you enter your meals how you are stacking up not just in carbs/proteins/fats, but in assorted nutrients (and you can customize).

As a middle-aged, post-menopausal woman, I wanna know that I'm getting  enough calcium and vitamin D. And I wouldn't have realized I'm chronically deficient in zinc, folate, B-12, and potassium had I not sparked. (I can't eat shellfish/seafood, and I won't eat organ meats, and I limit my nuts/seeds for caloric reasons,  so I tend to have issues with areas where those are the major suppliers of particular nutrients.)

Thanks to Sparking that journal, I have been able to target my supplement intake to what I need, not just shove some in my mouth "just in case." I love doing the report after supper and seeing where I need to boost nutrients--and am most happy when I meet goals in most categories. But knowing where the holes are lets me know if I need a B-complex or just a B-12 dot, if I need to have more romaine or spinach, if I should add a beef dish, if I need to pop a Citrical-D max.  I do find that I have to take zinc. Period. I have almost never ever made my zinc nutrient RDA, so, yeah, I take liquid ionic zinc. It tastes truly hideous, but I do it, cause I suspect at the bottom of my chronic skin and thinning hair issues may be this chronic zinc deficiency.

Because I was low on potassium yesterday (I usually am, and most Americans usually are), I had some banana with dinner and coconut water with lunch on Wednesday. This morning, I added a banana-skim-milk-raw-cocoa-powder smoothie to breakfast to get magnesium/calcium/D/potassium (all nutrients that a lot of people fall short of, including me if I'm not careful with meal planning).

So, what is the tricky part in the subject header?

Well, no nutrition tracker that I've ever used is comprehensive for all users. If you buy stuff ready-made, you better have the ability to deconstruct that chicken salad or beef stew or whatever it is you bought to get the components (unless someone posts a generic you just go with).

Today, breakfast is a delivery meal from Diet-To-Go that I'm using to get me through the first few weeks of the Summer Slimmin' Challenge. (See badge on top of my sidebar for info).  While the Diet-To-Go site has some nutritional info, it doesn't give it for the major nutrients (just the "top label" ones, fat, sodium, carbs, protein, calories). It doesn't give me the nutrients in my Eggs Florentine with soy sausage and asparagus, which, given there's spinach, milk, and eggs in there, should be nice. I know it's high protein (44 grams) and low-carb (6, and hence me having the banana, heh, cause I didn't have toast), but not how much of vitamins, minerals, etc.

That diminishes the usefulness of my journaling (in terms of health), although I still will know the calories and major categories that most dieters care about.

Still, I want to know that I had enough folate or B-12 or magnesium. It matters to me.

So, the convenience of diet delivery meals makes for inconvenient food tracking. Hey, Diet-to-Go! Make it easy for Sparkers who use your food. Give us the lowdown. BETTER YET: Contact SparkPeople, you Diet-To-Go administrators,  and give them your meal titles/info and side dishes and the comprehensive nutrient breakdown, so that these can be added to the food database there. Who knows? You might get a lot more subscribers through that huge online community (of millions of fatfighters!)

Anyway, visit other blogging fatfighters/health-seekers in the Fat to Fit Blog Hop:

Go ye and hydrate, move, laugh, and lose!

Happy fatfighting this Thursday!