Because She told me to

After becoming a member of FatSecret at the recommendation of my friend, Bill, I have finally begun using it to record my intake. Unlike Bill, I don't have one of the favored smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android, or Blackberry), so I had to come up with my own method of keeping track of my food when I'm away from my computer.

Back when I was on Crate Watchers, I was emailing my food to my own Gmail inbox with an alias added, whose filter would see the alias and sort the message accordingly as well as forward the message to my wife who would tell me approximately how many Weight Watchers points my meal was worth. After that I could fill in my Crate Watchers Tracking Sheet (a Google Docs spreadsheet) with the appropriate information.

Unfortunately for me, I have to do it on my own now, as Allison's diet has it's own website, science,  and food. While I've been trying to similarly cut back and eat healthier, she was concerned that I might not be getting enough of a balanced diet at the same time. She asked me to record my intake for at least a few days so we could take a look at the results. This left me with the question of where to go to do this. There are a number of places to do this, but I was already a member of FatSecret and was suitably impressed with their options, so I decided to give them a try, and I like it now that I don't need to worry about forgetting to enter my food if I don't want to run back and forth between my computer and the kitchen as I build my meal.

My solution consists of using Remember The Milk (AKA RTM, my favoritest reminder service), and a message template stored on my phone. I only use this message in MMS form, so that a particularly long list of ingredients isn't cut into smaller messages by SMS character length limitations. The message is customized to tell RTM everything it needs to make a new task. I'll explain what each part does. Here's what it looks like:

T: Log Meal
P: 3
D: Now
S: Dieting
U: http://www.fatsecret.com/
---

• The "T" tells RTM what the name of the task is. When emailing a new task to RTM, you can usually just name the task in the subject line of the message, but sending the message from my phone without this specified in the message body was somehow throwing off all the rest of the settings, so I have to specify it in the message body.
• The "P" sets the priority of the task. You can choose 1, 2, 3, or not specify a priority. Most of my RTM usage does not involve priorities, so even a priority of 3 sends this straight to the top.
• The "D" sets the due date/time.
• The "S" specifies what tags are applied to the task
• I bet you can guess what the "U" does. Ha!
• The 3 hyphens designate the area for notes to attach to the task.

When I start assembling my meal, I open this template and my cursor pops down to the end of the message. This is exactly where I need it to be when I start listing the foods I'm about to consume. For items not taken directly from single serving packages, I weigh them on the scale (usually in grams), then make note of the weight and item in the message. I can end up with a big list if I'm having a bowl of salad, or just a couple of items. Either way, I've got a task recorded on the web to remind me what I need to do later on, along with a way to keep track of when it was done and what I ate.  Woohoo!!

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