To replace MyFitnessPal in our toolchain I am on the hunt for at least some quality food fact data.
The Open Food Facts data base seems to be one source – although in sparse and questionable quality (after first initial testing).
There is a comprehensive documentation about the fields of data supported. And there are several formats that the raw data can be downloaded in.
There are ready-made applications available as well. Definitly worth looking into further.
If you do not know japanese curry yet you are missing out big time.
Unfortunately due to typhoon 19 the Musashikosugi Curry Expo had been cancelled along the overall Kosugi Festival 2019.
But the curry stamp rally did start earlier than the typhoon hit the city and carries on still until end of october.
It works like this:
You go to each restaurant. You eat a meal. You get a stamp.
The more stamps you collect the higher valued the prices. More meal coupons even electronics!
But anyway. It’s all about japanese and indian curry. And for that
As you too might want to tick all 28 restaurants of your bucket list take this map I made of all 28:
As you can see – on the iPhone Google Maps app you even get a nice progress bar of those you already visited. I’ve been to parco curry already – so that counted.
You are likely aware of the existence of the “Michelin Guide“.
Michelin Guides are a series of guide books published by the French tyre company Michelin for more than a century. The term normally refers to the annually published Michelin Red Guide, the oldest European hotel and restaurant reference guide, which awards up to three Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.
Wikipedia
You might also be aware that Tokyo is the city with the highest density of Michelin star rated restaurants. Nice, eh?
A purchase of this guide is recommended in any case but these days people also need something they can intuitively use and which integrates into already existing workflows.
These people, like myself, need a map and maybe more details in a machine readable, filterable spreadsheet.
And as time goes on it might be quite useful to have all the sources that lead to these great tables and maps. Sources that allow you to crawl and grab these information.
A script that crawls Tokyo-based michelin guide establishments and saves it into a JSON file. I personally did this project so I can plan my tokyo trip based on the cheapest and most-renowned restaurants,
Michelin Guide Crawler on GitHub
It had been mentioned before: regarding my own health until 2015 I did not have any structure and understanding when it came to food, sports, weight and all that is connected.
I used to be around 147kg (324lbs) when I made the decision to change that. Less than 8 months later I reached the weight that is considered “normal weight” for my body height.
Maybe more important than losing weight and going from class III obesity to normal is to keep in the range offering the biggest health benefits.
Apart from sport and being more active the key to managing weight in general for me was to understand and keep learning about food from many different perspectives.
Like in good science to learn more and make progress you got to listen and take well notes. Some things only can be understood when there’s enough historical data available. Not only the amount of time logged but also what is being logged is quite important.
In a normal week I am used to one-meal-a-day which I am preparing myself together with my wife. We eat in the evening – this makes things so much easier as there’s one time and space where everything regarding food comes together during routine days.
Also this routine works well in the long run. If we only got 10 minutes to prepare we will be able to hit the nutrition targets with either much or not-so-much quantities of food. In the last 4 years we practiced and played and created recipes for all situations you can think of. In a way we have made our simple-and-healthy-recipes the fall-back position we are using when we otherwise would have eaten something unhealthy.
Most importantly: We have tracked everything we cooked and ate. On a gram scale. I even built our own wifi enabled and calibrated kitchen scales.
Where do we track? There are so many options but since 2015 we stick to MyFitnessPal.
We are still happy using this as the base for tracking as the app is bearable even on Android and the food database that it uses is offering a good-enough data detail level.
So after more than 4 years of doing this a lot of data as come together. As I am doing it in sync with my wife a lot of things happened…
We have not become vegans. We eat meat still and we still like it. It’s just that the quality of meat we eat has gotten much better and with this the number of times we eat meat have reduced to maybe once a week at most.
We have started to eat things and experiment cooking with ingredients we did not know a year ago. While we keep adding ingredients all the time we find that you can optimize and gain so much joy from just jumping in head first into new tastes and recipes.
We’ve developed a “body-feel”. Apart from the taste buds changing completely over time I could not have thought of how much food influences how you feel. Different nutritious values lead to very different feels afterwards. I would go as far to say that most of the headaches I very frequently had while being overweight could have been traced back to what I’ve eaten just before.
So what now? We will keep tracking. Maybe not on a cloud service but on our self-hosted service. Maybe you got a good hint towards such self-hosted solutions to enter and track nutrition over time.