Meal Prep Calculator
I started creating my Meal Prep Calculator as a means to more efficiently design meals that satisfied my nutritional requirements. The fact is, like most Americans, I used to eat like crap all the time. As I got older, that translated into feeling like crap all the time, which was clearly not sustainable. Thus began my journey to fix my diet and learn more about nutrition and physical health.
First, let's address this upfront: the realm of nutrition and health is full of snake oil salesman. The amount of misinformation out there is absolutely overwhelming and I can understand why folks give up. Imagine trying fad diet after fad diet, only to have little or no success, time after time after time. Or maybe you found success, but it's not sustainable so you rebound hard and wind up worse off than you were before. Maybe you keep blaming yourself, because of the misguided belief that it can work for you, too, if you just put in more effort or had more willpower.
...but it's all bullshit! You've been sold a lie. They sell an easy solution to weight loss because people tend to stop listening when you tell them it takes hard work. The problem is a lack of understanding. How are we to reduce our weight if we don't even understand the actual mechanisms behind weight gain in the first place? It would not be possible except through sheer dumb luck. For the rest of us, it truly does boil down to this simple equation:
Calories In - Calories Out
That's literally it. Yes, there's nuance, and a whole lot under the surface that you should understand as well, but if you had to boil it down to one equation... this would be it. Once I figured this out, I was able to get my weight under control. My strategy was to make meals containing low-calorie ingredients that gave a feeling of fullness that lasted for as long as possible. I spent weeks tracking what I ate with MyFitnessPal and calculating the weekly average so I could see what my average daily caloric intake looked like and whether that amount was changing my weight. I was looking for my maintenance level of calories; the number I needed to stay the same weight. From that point, it was just a simple matter of designing my diet to contain 100 or 200 calories fewer per day. If you can do that and stick with it, you will lose weight!
Now, MyFitnessPal has issues, so I didn't have a lot of confidence in using it. Plus, as far as I know you can't use to design meals. So this is why I began my Meal Prep Calculator. I used to keep track of things in Excel, but it was a pain in the butt calculating everything each time. Now I simply add the ingredients to the database, add the recipe and recipe's ingredients, and I can query a view I've built to show me the complete nutritional value of one serving of that recipe. It makes it simple to design your diet and keep track of your calories and macronutrients!
Meal Prep Calculator is still a work in progress. Currently, it just lives in a database, but I plan to eventually make a web front-end for it so it's easier to manage and can be used by other people as well.
First, let's address this upfront: the realm of nutrition and health is full of snake oil salesman. The amount of misinformation out there is absolutely overwhelming and I can understand why folks give up. Imagine trying fad diet after fad diet, only to have little or no success, time after time after time. Or maybe you found success, but it's not sustainable so you rebound hard and wind up worse off than you were before. Maybe you keep blaming yourself, because of the misguided belief that it can work for you, too, if you just put in more effort or had more willpower.
...but it's all bullshit! You've been sold a lie. They sell an easy solution to weight loss because people tend to stop listening when you tell them it takes hard work. The problem is a lack of understanding. How are we to reduce our weight if we don't even understand the actual mechanisms behind weight gain in the first place? It would not be possible except through sheer dumb luck. For the rest of us, it truly does boil down to this simple equation:
Calories In - Calories Out
That's literally it. Yes, there's nuance, and a whole lot under the surface that you should understand as well, but if you had to boil it down to one equation... this would be it. Once I figured this out, I was able to get my weight under control. My strategy was to make meals containing low-calorie ingredients that gave a feeling of fullness that lasted for as long as possible. I spent weeks tracking what I ate with MyFitnessPal and calculating the weekly average so I could see what my average daily caloric intake looked like and whether that amount was changing my weight. I was looking for my maintenance level of calories; the number I needed to stay the same weight. From that point, it was just a simple matter of designing my diet to contain 100 or 200 calories fewer per day. If you can do that and stick with it, you will lose weight!
Now, MyFitnessPal has issues, so I didn't have a lot of confidence in using it. Plus, as far as I know you can't use to design meals. So this is why I began my Meal Prep Calculator. I used to keep track of things in Excel, but it was a pain in the butt calculating everything each time. Now I simply add the ingredients to the database, add the recipe and recipe's ingredients, and I can query a view I've built to show me the complete nutritional value of one serving of that recipe. It makes it simple to design your diet and keep track of your calories and macronutrients!
Meal Prep Calculator is still a work in progress. Currently, it just lives in a database, but I plan to eventually make a web front-end for it so it's easier to manage and can be used by other people as well.
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