We’re on a mission to get more people in tune with their bodies. Why? Because when you know what you need to feel your best, you can make informed decisions that have a lasting positive impact on your personal health.
Our Know Yourself Ambassadors have been sharing why they think it’s so important to know yourself, and here are a few more reasons why we believe it’s the key to living your most joyful life.
Meet Shirondale
Our latest Know Yourself Ambassador, Shirondale has been using Cronometer for the past year. He loves doing a deep dive on all of the data that his Cronometer account provides and gets a kick out of finding trends in his nutrition habits. Shirondale is father to a beautiful daughter and is stringent about weighing his meals and recipes so that he is getting the most accurate information possible.
How did you learn about Cronometer?
Through a web search, I was looking for alternatives for a food diary. I needed a lot of control and flexibility in what I used. The name and app icon stood out to me along with the quality of reviews from normal individuals. They made it sound more like a tool instead of a fad with their tone and choice of language so I just had to check it out.
What is your favourite feature?
The Exploding Recipes feature! So if I make a variant on a dish, I can have a lot of the work already done. I probably would have given up on logging food if I couldn’t do that.
Tell us about your diet!
My diet isn’t anything too formal like keto or vegan. I just try to use whole foods to meet as many of my rdas and personal goals as possible. I do this while trying to keep the ingredient list as small as possible.
So I end up buying a lot of dried goods like beans, rice and lentils alongside frozen vegetables and anything else that can be shelf stable for a while. That way if I get tired of an ingredient, I can just ignore it for something else without worrying about food waste.
I definitely used to throw away quite a bit of food before using Cronometer. The combo of wasted money, lost nutrition and breaking recipes made me look for another way. The databases in the app let me see that nutrition for certain foods were often comparable or even better in some cases. You definitely end up with a lot less salt by cooking beans from dried yourself.
Before Cronometer I didn’t realize how much water I could potentially get from eating food itself. That makes water goals more attainable. I tend to treat my goal in Cronometer as the minimum goal and the stated straight water goal as the stretch/max goal.
Anything else you want to add?
I know that for the past year that Cronometer has made meal prepping and logging food much easier for myself. If I just weigh and note foods as a recipe that makes it a million times easier to log food when I’m eating later. I don’t know if the feature is new, but being able to log cooked weight directly in the recipes has made me feel a lot better. I used to just determine servings by trying to equally divide food between containers. Now I can just store food quickly by feel, tare out a similar container before eating then accurately log the actual weight by using the saved recipe. This also works great when I’m sharing a meal with my daughter and I decide to portion things off straight from the pot to the plates.
I’m able to correlate some of my eating behaviors and personal feelings with a combination of shared data (steps, blood pressure, glucose, etc) and just going through data over time. I noticed that my blood pressure got higher after eating certain processed foods, and that I started to be likely to eat those foods when my activity level lowered. My activity lowering seems to correlate with how often I cook my meals. I’m still struggling with some things, but slowly I’ve been nickel and diming my health back using Cronometer as one of my key tools.
Just recently I used the app to help plan my grocery shopping. I did this lightly last year, but this month I tried to figure out a nutritionally complete diet that I could afford and stick to while having a decent amount of meal diversity. I took into account the food that I already have and took an honest look at how I work things out day-to-day. Doing this has been the equivalent of a person wearing a uniform that would normally be overwhelmed by choice and peer pressure – it completely lifted a weight. It may look boring, but it gives me one less thing to worry about and it’s a frictionless experience.
My BMR is 2594 and I’m very lightly active at the moment. I’m eating between 1200-2200 calories per day and am feeling great. I don’t always get all green bars on macros, but I do at least get satiated. If my calorie count is low, it’s not me starving myself – I legitimately was not any hungrier. So I get to eat much more freely now. Cronometer helped me to build an environment where I’m confident in what I’m eating.
I’m able to correlate some of my eating behaviors and personal feelings with a combination of shared data (steps, blood pressure, glucose, etc) and just going through data over time. I noticed that my blood pressure got higher after eating certain processed foods, and that I started to be likely to eat those foods when my activity level lowered. My activity lowering seems to correlate with how often I cook my meals. I’m still struggling with some things, but slowly I’ve been nickel and diming my health back using Cronometer as one of my key tools.
Just recently I used the app to help plan my grocery shopping. I did this lightly last year, but this month I tried to figure out a nutritionally complete diet that I could afford and stick to while having a decent amount of meal diversity. I took into account the food that I already have and took an honest look at how I work things out day-to-day. Doing this has been the equivalent of a person wearing a uniform that would normally be overwhelmed by choice and peer pressure – it completely lifted a weight. It may look boring, but it gives me one less thing to worry about and it’s a frictionless experience.
My BMR is 2594 and I’m very lightly active at the moment. I’m eating between 1200-2200 calories per day and am feeling great. I don’t always get all green bars on macros, but I do at least get satiated. If my calorie count is low, it’s not me starving myself – I legitimately was not any hungrier. So I get to eat much more freely now. Cronometer helped me to build an environment where I’m confident in what I’m eating.
