Pace your nutrition with Foodclocks
Foodclocks is a new way of looking at nutrition. With Foodclocks you pace your nutrition as you go through your day.
How does it work? You've seen nutritional labels on food packaging.
The Foodclocks way is to convert the nutritional data to time or duration to give you an idea of the pacing of your food.
To my mind, thinking of nutrition in terms of time is far more intuitive than trying to interpret weights, measures and percentages.
For example, the thought that the sugars in my snack might be worth 38% of my daily Reference Intake does not mean as much to me as knowing they are worth just over 6 hours.
Try entering the Reference Intake percentages from your own foods to see how they compare.
How does Foodclocks work?
Foodclocks spreads the Reference Intake percentages over the number of hours in your waking day (on the assumption that you don't eat in your sleep).
The calculations on this page are based on a 16 hour waking day.
To see this, try entering 100% and you will see 16 hours and 0 minutes. (If you enter 50% you will see 8 hours and 0 minutes, and so on for other percentage values.)
But what if I don't know the Reference Intake percentages?
Most foods don't have % Reference Intake values printed on them (fruits and vegetables for example).
You need an app! Specifically, you need the Foodclocks app.
What if I want to keep track of the foods I've eaten?
You need a convenient way of looking-up foods and adding them to a list.
You can do this with the Foodclocks app!
What if I practice time-restricted eating?
You might want to pace your eating over a period of 6, 9 or 12 hours say.
No problem with the Foodclocks app.
What if I'm not a "standard" person?
Printed Reference Intake values are for a standard or average person. The chances are that you are neither standard nor average
You can adjust and personalise the Reference Intake values and the duration of your waking day with the Foodclocks app.
Now, what if there was an app that solves these problems and shows you how to pace and balance your nutrients at a glance as you go through through your day?
Try the Foodclocks app! It's Free!
What’s different and new about the Foodclocks app is that you can immediately see the balance of nutrients at a glance because the data is converted into a form that’s extremely familiar and easy to grasp: a series of clocks.
look up, browse or search foods
You can look-up, search or browse foods by A-Z, by category (e.g. Fruits and Vegetables) and by their weights and measures (e.g. cups, slices and servings)
add your chosen foods to a list
Add to the Today's Choices list to keep a running order of the foods you've consumed
inspect Today's Clocks to see how the nutrients are paced and balanced
The clocks let you instantly see the relative pacing and balance of the nutrients
click on one of Today's Clocks to see how your selected nutrient is building up
For example if you click on Protein, you will see a list of 'Protein Clocks' that show how each food is contributing to that nutrient
change your personal settings as you require
You can adjust the window of time (e.g. from 0900 AM to 1800 PM ) and the nutrient reference values because your milage may vary
How did I come up with the idea for Foodclocks ?
One morning I was eating a biscuit (or two) when it dawned on me that I might have eaten so much that I should really skip lunch. So I had a look at the packaging.
The label had a lot of data (such as energy per biscuit 71 kcal, 298 kJ, 4% of the Reference Intake) but I had no intuitive feel about what the data meant.
What I actually wanted to know was: how do I pace my biscuit habit throughout the day? How much time is each biscuit worth?
That got me thinking.
Reference Intake values are a guide to the amounts of nutrients that can be eaten every day for a healthy diet.
In my case, each biscuit had 4% of the of the Reference Intake for energy.
Each biscuit is thereore worth 4% of my day! But how long is my day?
I'm asleep for 8 hours per day and I only eat when I'm awake, so my eating day is 16 hours. Each biscuit's energy is therefore worth 4% of 16 hours, or 38 minutes.