I have been focused on using this tool for nutrients since starting up the app over a month ago. Using my computer programmer’s brain, I have some thoughts:

• Nutrients can be defined in Health Measurements. Presently I have “Protein”, “Sodium”, and several others. I don’t want to have to locate the actual measurements (like 15% DV or 123mg). Just too time consuming. So I have these health measurements take in a rating, 0 to 10. Effectively, I’m estimating. Not ideal, but can help develop a reasonable perspective on the data.

• There are many programs that can convert foods into their nutritional contents. Some allow you to scan the barcode and get back the values. Neat. My Fitbit app actually has a database of foods. The point is, we should use those tools for gathering the data. Don’t even use the Food feature within Bearable.

• Once you identify a good app for gathering the data, ask the Bearable team to integrate with it.

On that note: Hey James & Co. Can you integrate with the Fitbit app’s nutritional data?

I’ll need to check out Fitbit, cool. I myself have been using MyFitnessPal, which has mixed results (WAY too many duplicate food listings, lots of wrong data, but at least it’s correctable if approached right). But the free version does let me log meals, tracks calories according to said meals and my specified portions (as well as increasing my calorie allowance if I exercise based on how many calories I burned), and I can check a nutrient list to see how much I got of each nutrient each day. And it tracks the three main macros (Protein, Fat, Carbs) on a pie chart, which I can compare to my personalized goal of how much I’m aiming for of each.

It would be EXTREMELY useful in Bearable, but sounds very complicated and daunting, especially if they want to allow more than one nutrition app, all with very different ways of tracking stuff.

Maybe at very least just an import of daily calorie intake (and/or per meal) would be a place to start, which should work with both apps.

I could also KIND of see it being plausible for Bearable to create food entries based on whatever the apps report as the name of the foods, though they’d have to likely program Bearable’s fetching method differently for each app. But then, having specific foods automatically filled in per meal would be SO much easier, so I don’t have to do it twice between both apps.

Then to top it off, if we could then go into all of Bearable’s stored food items like an editable list (as I suggest elsewhere to at least do with the Favorites), we could have the option of attaching Factors to each food item. (For example, I can attach “dairy” to each instance of an Ice Cream, a one-time setup which can then be kept in memory and recalled/applied later by Bearable next time the item is reported.)

Though I worry about how much memory using such specific food entries from these nutrient/calorie tracking apps could end up taking up for Bearable, having potentially hundreds of foods over time kept on record (As opposed to Bearable’s ability to have fewer, more general entries if the users are being easy on themselves). So that may not be feasible. Guess that’s for the devs to decide though. ^^;;

Personally I have found that I get irritable when consuming too much magnesium. Irritability is a factor that can be tracked. Magnesium is not. There is another entry on here about importing stuff from Chronometer. I think going about solving it as an entire nutritional solution will bear more fruit then an individuals choice of what to track. It would also reduce a lot of friction.

MyFitnessPal is what I am using for this. I wish they had more nutrients, but I. Making it work.