Measuring a day, and where it stops.
Working notes from building a calorie tracker: what the public food data actually says, which numbers an app has no business inventing, and what a chart claims before anybody reads it.
-
17 August 2026 · How the sausage is counted
Where calorie counts actually come from
Two apps give the same banana different numbers, and neither is lying. What FoodData Central is, why energy values are calculated rather than measured, and why the portion — not the laboratory — is where your factor-of-two errors live.
-
17 August 2026 · Design decisions
Don’t predict what nobody has eaten yet
We shipped a projection to midnight and then deleted it. Burn is a physical rate that accrues whether or not anyone is watching; intake accrues only when somebody records it. Extrapolate the second and “nothing logged” silently becomes “nothing will be eaten”.
-
17 August 2026 · Design decisions
A bigger deficit is not a better day
A progress ring means more is better and full is the goal. A calorie deficit is not a quantity to maximise, so the ring is the wrong shape — what a diverging scale does instead, and why amber starts late and red never starts.
RSS, if you would rather not be on a mailing list.