In Cambodia I stumbled upon the USDA Supertracker. After watching the HBO documentary "Weight of the Nation" I became almost obsessed with learning about nutrition and understanding how it worked. (click on "Weight of the Nation" to follow a link to the website. The films are free.) The information in those films made a huge impact on me, and I wanted to learn more. At first, trying to find good information was pretty frustrating. All the most popular sites, the ones that pop up first, want to sell me something. It's actually hard work to wade through the garbage and dredge up the trustworthy credible sources on nutrition. I shared my frustration with my husband and he suggested the USDA website.
I've heard quite often that tracking your calories and keeping a food journal are helpful tools for losing weight. I kept a food points journal with weight watchers and I could handle that as long as I was losing weight, as long as the numbers on the scale were going down. At a different time I tried writing down what I ate in a notebook and the calorie count next to it. That felt like soooo much work. It seemed that all I was doing all day long was hunting down the calorie counts of food. The result of that was I started eating the same food so I didn't have to look up any new calorie counts. And then I just quit because that was a boring diet and the whole food journal process was too hard and not at all rewarding.
In Cambodia, after 9 months of cardio training, I knew I needed and was ready to take a serious look at my nutrition. So I started tracking my food and physical activity on the Supertracker. (the highlighted word is a link to the website) And it was surprisingly FUN! On the Supertracker there are all kinds of graphs and reports to show what kind and how much food I'm consuming. I can look at a whole list of vitamins and minerals individually in a graph over time. I love graphs! For some reason it's really like a game for me to watch how my food choices affect the graphs. And it's funny because just recording my food, and seeing what happens in the food tracker, caused me to change what I wanted to eat. Since I wanted to see the bar for vegetables go up in the Daily Food Groups Target bar graph, I added vegetables to my food plan for the day. Each day I made adjustments to fit what I ate to try to match the targets and limits of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, protein, saturated fat, oils, sodium, dietary fiber, iron and a whole list of others. I pored over the graphs of my own personal nutrition. And when I saw I was low in iron I looked up foods that are good sources of iron. I learned that beef, chicken, tuna, broccoli, spinach, dried apricots and surprisingly black strap molasses are a few of the foods containing iron.
I discovered the Supertracker in the middle of October and had only used the tool for a couple of weeks when we moved back to the states. In November I tried to keep up my new habit, but it became too time consuming and difficult with all the transition.
But on July 1st I signed into my account on the Supertracker and started tracking my food and physical activity again. And the same kind of adjusting of my behaviors resulted. Simply from entering the food I ate each day and noticing what happened on the graphs and in the reports!
One of my favorite features of the Supertracker is My Recipe. I can enter the ingredients of any recipe I make, assign a number of portions, and the Supertracker will tell me all kinds of information about a single portion of that recipe. I've done the same thing by hand several times: adding up all the calories and saturated fat and dividing by the number of portions I want. It's way more work! And I don't get all the interesting information about nutrients and minerals that I do with the Supertracker. Lately I've been comparing my veg puree filled desserts to a regular version to see how they stack up.
This week I made a banana nut bread recipe that I created over the winter. And because I'm on a veg puree kick, I added 1/2 cup of butternut squash to the batter. Then I compared that to Starbucks Banana Nut Bread. On the Starbucks website there is nutritional information for many of the items they sell in the stores. This is how 2 portions (I cut my slices in half) of my banana nut bread compare to 1 slice of Starbucks banana nut bread.
Starbucks
Banana Nut Bread
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Sabrina’s Banana Nut Bread (with flaxseed meal and butternut squash)
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Calories
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420
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376
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Total Fat
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21g
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21g
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Saturated Fat
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3g
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2g
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Sugar
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31g
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18g
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Fiber
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2
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7
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Protein
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6
|
9
|
I love charts. :) With the help of the Supertracker, I can make this chart for myself and have a real measurement of my effort to improve the quality of my food. "What gets measured, gets improved." I read that in an article on fitness and I think it makes sense. So I'm trying to find ways to measure the things I want to improve.
Man, I want the energy of this toddler! Just think what I could do!!! Here's hoping good nutrition will get me at least closer. :)
Man, I want the energy of this toddler! Just think what I could do!!! Here's hoping good nutrition will get me at least closer. :)
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