Tracking calories

Hello there,

I’m a newbie to Beeminder but I’ve used it briefly in the early months of 2020 before COVID-19 disrupted my daily routines. I want to be held accountable for tracking my food - I use LoseIt to push data to Fitbit which can autosync with Beeminder. So I’ve created a goal not to exceed a certain amount of calories. However, the problem is that I often do not track the calories and then this goal will not help me as it will definitely not exceed the limit. So I want to have both a minimum (that indicates I’ve actually tracked the calories this day) and a maximum (so I stick to the calories I can consume that day). Any ideas on how to implement this?

best wishes,

Claus

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You need a second goal for monitoring the minimum amount of calories. For example if your average is 2000 calories per day, you can set a rate of 1800. You can also set the “Max safe days” number so that you’re always at a state of having 2 or 3 safe days.

An alternative is to make a binary goal “did I track calories today and consume between 1800 and 2000 calories?” with a rate of 1/day. If yes, enter a 1; if no, you get charged!

@clausdh For me personally I would create a separate goal that basically states I tracked my calories for the day. Some examples where I have done something similar include:

1.This goal was made to make sure I don’t delete my GTbee tasks as you can delete them without marking them complete so I do a daily check to make sure I did not delete any. (nogtbeedelete – linux535 – beeminder)

  1. I didn’t want to have a beeminder goal for a lot of smaller simplistic tasks. So I decided to use the streaks app to put in all my smaller tasks (about 8 tasks). Issue was I wanted to find a way to hold myself accountable to not deleting my streaks goals since unlike a beeminder goal I could delete them on a whim. Thus (nodeleteorreducestreaks – linux535 – beeminder) was born. It has worked great for me.

Note: As @apolyton pointed out this second goal could be a minimum amount of calories instead of a putting if you did or didn’t track your calories. Only possible issue is if you do track it for a day and happen to be under the minimum.

As @zedmango pointed out you can just make it a binary goal. The one negative is not being able to see all the cool statistics on the amount of daily calories in Beeminder. Another would be with this method you would be relying on your fine print which you can change at any time where as with a normal Beeminder goal it makes you wait a week for the change to happen. However this might not be a problem for you, it would be for me as I can be weasely sometimes.

Also welcome to the Beeminder forum and Beeminder! I have only been around for a few months on Beeminder (few weeks on the forum) and have really enjoyed it thus far. If you need me to clarify anything I said just let me know.

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This is why I suggested using a rate that is a bit below the average.