You cannot change what you don’t measure
I found this idea in the personal development space, that you can’t change what you don’t see (or measure). And I wanted to change my eating habits – to eat less often but also to eat healthier. This translates to a decrease in meal frequency but also an increase in meal quality.
There were also meal-related questions I couldn’t answer. What did I eat two weeks ago? The day before yesterday? Actually, what did eat yesterday? I couldn’t remember.
So, what does every good programmer do when they need a tool to track their own personal habits?
That’s right – they write their own. From scratch, preferably. It doesn’t matter if there are hundreds of meal tracking solutions out there. We just re-invent the wheel and write our own tool. That’s exactly what I did.
Becoming aware of our eating habits
I’ve always had a special relationship with food. This means that I eat to feel good. The problem occurs when I eat much more than I actually need.
I believed that if I became aware of how often I ate, maybe that would help me change my habits.
Through this app, I wanted to keep evidence of my daily meals and, most importantly, to own my personal data.
The other meal-tracking solutions out there add too much complexity all of a sudden. Maybe I don’t want to track my calories right now.
It’s better to start with a simple solution I will use everyday than trying to deal with too much complexity all of a sudden.
But, more importantly, with a custom-made software solution, you get to keep ownership of your personal data.
Here’s the simple interface I designed to enter a meal (it’s in Romanian):
All I needed was a day, a time and a list of ingredients. That’s good enough to get started with tracking meals.
But habit change was only half of the motivation behind it.
Practicing Skills
Work on this app was also an opportunity to practice my put my Laravel and Vue.js expertise to good use.
You see, I’ve recently ended a collaboration where I served as a web developer. It lasted for almost a year. When the collaboration ended, I felt it was a such shame to let all those good programming skills go to waste.
And there’s another saying in the personal development space – What you don’t use, you lose.
I promise, that’s the last nugget of cliché wisdom for today.
So, let’s use those skills! Let’s setup that Laravel project, let’s inject some Vue.js love into that front-end and import those PrimeVue components one by one.
And voilà! Meal tracker online!
Practicing everyday, like Bruce Lee. But with code.
