Great question. Macronutrient tracking has been around for sometime and is coming back in vogue. This approach can be helpful if you have identified a specific problem in your diet and would like to run an experiment. For example, if your healthcare practitioner suspects your diet is lacking in protein and you’re not sure how to increase your protein intake, tracking macronutrients can help identify the problem and fine-tune your choices. For this reason we are looking at building health professional enabled macronutrient tracking in Nourishly in the future.

However, there are considerable problems to using this approach without professional oversight, which lead the Nourishly team to leave this functionality out (for now) of the consumer product. A couple of problems:

Accuracy challenges: Unless you are weighing every ounce of food, your estimates are likely going to be off. Even if you are obsessively diligent about measuring, the chances that the nutrients in your food are represented accurately in nutrient databases is unlikely.

It’s really challenging to match specific macronutrient goals exactly: If your macronutrient ratio isn’t where “it should” be, you might beat yourself up over not being perfect (whatever that means). This sets you up to enter the well-established diet/binge cycle or at the very least, feel like a failure. We don’t want our users to be in that place.

It takes the focus away from your inner body cues and can be addicting: It is based on the premise that if you track the nutrients coming in, you somehow have gained “control” of your eating and can ensure you never get too much or too little. However, you might feel like you don’t have “permission” to act on you body’s instincts, or worry that you will lose control. You might feel like if you stop you’re going to mess up or eat the wrong proportion of things.

Instead of focusing on the numbers, Nourishly includes hunger and fullness, stress levels, digestive symptoms, mindful eating etc, which we believe is much more useful. Our ultimate goal is that users learn sustainable habits and no longer have a need to keep a food log.