Students, please take your seats and open your notebooks in preparation for the fourth and final session in our 4-week back to school series teaching you all about nutrition from the ground up.
This week, we’ll be going over some of the functionality in Cronometer that can help you apply what you’ve learned in this course to your own diet and nutrition. Over the past three weeks, we’ve given you homework assignments which, unbeknownst to you, were training you for this section of the course.
Class is beginning, so if you’re ready to hit the books, scroll down to get started
The Daily Report
For optimal nutrition, it’s important that you’re giving your body all of the vitamins, minerals and nutrients that it needs to thrive. Many of your homework assignments had you check your Daily Report for specific nutrients. This report is extremely useful to make sure you’re hitting all your required nutrients for the day.
Keep an eye on your Daily Report to help identify where you might be falling short with your diet and allows you to adjust what you eat throughout the day in order to reach your targets.
The Nutrition Report
The Nutrition Report looks the same as the Daily Report, but it gives an average of your nutrient intake over a specified time period rather than just a snapshot of that day. If you’re using the Basic (free) account, you can look at a 7 day timespan, but Gold subscribers have the ability to use any time frame.
Look at your Nutrition Report to help identify any trends in your diet. If you notice that you’re consistently falling short in one area, think about introducing foods that are high in that nutrient into your diet or using supplements to help meet those targets.
Finding Nutrient Information
Your Cronometer account provides a plethora of information, including explanations on what all of the nutrients functions are and which foods are sources of that nutrient. Some of your homework assignments had you do this, so you should be familiar with this functionality by now.
If you want to learn more about a specific nutrient or are looking for suggestions on what to eat to get more of it, tap or hover on that nutrient for additional information.
Charts
Cronometer’s Chart functionality can be extremely helpful when it comes to identifying trends or correlations. One of your homework assignments had you check a Single Nutrient Chart to view your daily intake of sodium over the previous two weeks. This is helpful to identify if there are specific days you tend to hit your targets or perhaps fall short on. From there, you can keep that in mind and adjust your diet to meet your targets more consistently.
Charts have so much more functionality, though! Read this blog for a deeper dive into what you can do with them.
Customize Your Settings
When you sign up for a Cronometer account, we default your energy settings based on the information you provide to us like your height, age, weight and weight goal. We do our best to make this as easy as possible for you, but if required, you have the ability to customize them to better suit your needs. Check in with your personal goals and make sure that your Cronometer account is set up to align with them. Here are just a few of the areas you’re able to customize:
Macronutrient Targets: choose how you want your calories distributed across protein, carbs and fats. We default to using ratios, but if you want to use fixed targets (ie. you want to hit 120 grams of protein per day) you can do that too!
Nutrient Targets: your micronutrient targets will default to all recommended DRI’s, but if your doctor has recommended that you get more of a particular nutrient, you’re able to change this.
Energy Settings: this is where you’ll choose a baseline activity level, set a weight goal or customize more advanced options like whether you’d like Cronometer to include the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) and exercise in your energy calculations.
Highlighted Nutrients
With Cronometer you can select up to 8 nutrients to highlight, allowing you to easily view your daily intake in the top header bar of the Diary. One of your homework assignments had you add magnesium, but you can choose whichever nutrients you’d like to pay attention to most.
Getting The Most Accurate Data
Most of our users love us because we provide accurate data. All of the nutrient information in our database is sourced from lab-analyzed sources or is checked by a staff member before being made available to the public.
There are however a few more ways to maximize your data accuracy:
- Log food from the food search as much as possible. Logging food via the Barcode Scanner may not bring up the food entry with the most nutrient data.
- Check the data source and nutrient count of the foods you’re logging
- Log accurate portion sizes
For more tips to ensuring you have the most accurate data, read this blog.
Go For Gold
As you can see, the Basic (free) version of Cronometer is jammed packed with tools to help you achieve optimal health. But, if you want to make that process a little easier, think about upgrading to our Gold subscription.
First of all, it’s ad-free so that speeds up your food logging game, but upgrading to Gold also unlocks several features that take on a lot of the heavy lifting, including:
- Food Suggestions: Get suggestions on what foods to eat to help meet your targets for the day.
- The Oracle: Find foods that are high in specific nutrients.
- Nutrition Scores: Bundle purpose-specific nutrients into an overall score for things you want to pay attention to like bone health, immunity and more.
- Custom Charts: Access new Basic Charts and create your own Custom Charts.
- More Insights: Unlimited timeframes for your Nutrition Report and Charts.
You’ve Graduated!
Congratulations! You’ve now completed our Nutrition 101 course, nicely done!
We hope that the last four weeks have been educational and that you’re walking away with a new understanding of the basics of nutrition and can apply that to your own diet.
The winner of the Grand Prize draw will be selected on October 2nd and will be contacted via email.
If you’re hungry for more nutrition knowledge, check out the rest of our blog or listen to our podcast.
