Lesson 3

Adding Ingredients

Welcome to Lesson 3! Yeah!

Yesterday we learned how to scan in a barcode, but what happens if we eat, let’s say an apple? Well, there’s a tool for that. We’ll also learn a bit about how super awesome and amazing single-ingredient foods are! Or in Fitness Frenzy’s case single-food ingredients (That’ll make sense later)

tl;dr - Single-ingredient foods are the building blocks of a healthy diet - they should make up at least 80% of what we eat. We log them similarly to the way we log barcodes.

The name single-ingredient foods kinda gives away the definition. We are talking about the very basic building blocks. Think of grandma’s famous cookie recipe - sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and milk chocolate. Everything that makes up that cookie is identifiable, we know what we are putting in our body. Now compare that to Mr. Keebler’s cookie ingredient list:

Enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, vitamin B1 [thiamin mononitrate], vitamin B2 [riboflavin], folic acid), sugar, vegetable oil (soybean, palm kernel and palm oil), high fructose corn syrup, cocoa processed with alkali, whey.

Unless you’re a super smarty pants, you won’t know everything on that list or why it’s there in the first place. IE you don’t know what’s going into your body. And our bodies are temples; we don’t want riff-raff entering. Now, here’s the thing, anything that we buy on the inside isles of grocery stores is going to have ingredient lists comparable to the one above. I’m not saying that they are necessarily unhealthy; which is a phrase we want to stay away from; because everything can be healthy or unhealthy in moderation or the lack thereof. I digress… Simplicity is the key to health. If we’re going to eat cookies, I’d argue we’d be happier with Nana’s homemade ones rather than storebought and premade. If you’re not sure if something falls into the category of single-ingredient, check the ingredient list, if it’s a single-ingredient, there will be only 1 ingredient listed.

As a rule of thumb to start eating healthier without having to do anything special, simply make single-ingredient foods (or a combination of them) 80% of your diet. Boom, health crisis solved! An easy trick for this is to shop on the outside walls of your grocery store. They make you walk around the entire store to get your staples hoping you’ll be tempted by the cookies in aisle 8.

Alright, single-ingredient foods are important, but how would I log or plan with them? Well, that’s easy, Fitness Frenzy was built around single-ingredient foods because I was sick of other calorie/macro tracking apps giving me 1000+ results for my staples like chicken breast. And it turns out that like foods have very similar nutrients. For a callback example - if you had an apple, it doesn’t really matter what type it is, all types of apples are similar in their nutritional breakdown. Actually, the weight of it matters much more than the type but let’s not worry about weighing our food just yet. So in the Fitness Frenzy database, if you had an apple today, you can just log ‘apple’ and know that you’re close enough to the mark (we’ll dial in our sights later!) So to log a single ingredient food, follow the gif below and finish by tapping “Complete TODOs” at the bottom!

From now on, we will be logging everything we eat that can easily be added by either a barcode or found in the built-in single-ingredient food database.

TODOs

• ☑️ Log your weight

• ☑️ Log any foods you consume that can be found by barcode or database

• ☑️ Special Challenge: Log and un-log Abuelita’s cookies from above (sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and milk chocolate)

Complete TODOs Below