Here is a way to deal with food stuff. I have a spreadsheet (see old page below) where the columns are an intervention, and a row is a date. In each cell on a row, I mark whether I did or didn’t do the thing, or I make a little annotation for “how” I did or fulfilled the thing, and infrequently “how much.” In the notes column, I make a little scribble of anything salient I notice. Over weeks you start noticing patterns. It can be very quick an informal, and it’ll still start informing your implicit models.
If you’re going by meals, you could have each day be multiple rows, one for each meal.
Here is a starter ontology that I would use for the columns:
Macronutrients:
- a) fast carbs (e.g. potato chips)
- b) slow carbs (potatoes, rice, beans — still pretty “fast” if you’re eating it hot)
- c) carbs with higher resistant starch content (chilled potatoes and rice)
- d) animal saturated fat (butter, cream, tallow, lard, to a lesser degree very fatty meat, milk and eggs)
- e) mono and poly fat (olive oil, nuts, etc.)
- f) animal protein
Micronutrients (food or pills)
- g) high potassium foods (or “lo salt”)
- h) Choline
- i) Magnesium
- j) animal-sourced vitamin A
- k) vitamin D3 or sunlight
Micronutrient-wise, I mostly follow the Perfect Health Diet recommendations. Their explicit models and reasoning may have some flaws, but I think their implicit models and recommendations are excellent.
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/recommended-supplements/
