Using excel to monitor your diet

I'd like to start using excel, rather than paper block notes, to monitor my diet.
I'm interested in the option to pre-compile meals, writing down all the nutrients and how they affect my health, so I can just cut and paste them in the lunch or dinner or a specific day.
Or also I like the idea of simply changing details and amounts in my saved meals simply with a click.


Well, I don't know where to begin as I'm computer illiterate and I don't know how to use excel.
Anyone wants to help me?

Calories simplified

There are two extremes when we talk about calories.
We have those who don't want to count calories, don't want to aproximately know how many calories are in their meals and don't believe it is needed and those that are so obsessed that need to know exactly the calories of the particular kind of fruit at the specific level of ripeness, they just ate.

As always I'm in the middle.
Knowing calories is important but since our body functions with a range of calories (we never eat the same amount every day but we tend to maintain our weight) and there's always a margin of error for absorption, edible part and so on, I think it's pretty easy to consider calories by groups of foods rather than by foods. This easily reduces the millions of calories value we should know to a few dozens that can easily be remembered. This would certainly be an aproximation but in my experience it is good enough to allow a pretty consistent caloric control.

Unfortunately the concept of body composition and weight control and calories has been faddished.
Most people consider fat loss as something for wannabe models or real obese and consider calories just a fad for the never thin enough. In truth body composition is far more important for health and health marks like inflamation and oxidative stress than it is for aesthetics. Losing fat is something the 90% of the pupolation need. No matter if they look normal and not fat at all, their health and body most likely would benefit from a percentage reduction in body fat. Caloric balance is not a fad for narcisists but one of the foundations of health. As shown by various studies on caloric restriction, extra calories always harm and it matters little whether they just bring up our total body fat or make us obese, the health effects are similar. Chronic excess calories play havoc with most health attributes and are contributing causes of letargy, silent inflamation, indigestion, fast aging, mood swings, bloatedness, heaviness, constipation, chronic fatigue, high triglycerides, volatile blood sugars, poor lipid profiles and more.

Counting calories (even once a month is usefull just to have a general idea of what we're doing and how we're eating, just a check up) is not in contradiction with the concept of instinctive hunger.
Clearly if we're not as healthy as we can be and our body composition is not perfect, we have screwed our natural sense of hunger. Counting calories is just a planning tool. No one should count every food eaten or every day worth of meals. It is though usefull to know how much to eat to find a balance and then let the body get used to that new balance until it becomes intinctive again.

It's a bit like a metronome.
You don't use the metronome every time you play a piece on an instrument.
But you listen to the metronome when you're not sure about the speed.
You just listen few beats and then have a general sense of the speed you need to follow.
At that point the metronome is not needed and the speed has been internalized.

Usually people who claim they can eat as much food as they want as long as they don't eat X food and claim that they consume 4000 calories of whatever food and as long as they don't eat X food they're healthy are usually deluded, fat (it just means they have an high percentage of fat not that they're visible overweight) not as healthy as they claim and have a poor body composition.
Not counting calories and gorging on foods as long as they are not the ones some fad diet bashes has been the promise made to make lazy people buy all the books and programs promising this. No wonder the authors and organization of some of these popular methods have become milionaries.

Here is my semplified calories tab.
I hope it can help you.

The calories are per 100 grams.

Bodybuilding

I chose to write something eventually and maybe what I will say will reconcile with your experience or intuition. I know most won't like what I have to say, most will disagree and those that considered me nice will change their mind. But as someone who started lifting weights at the age of 10 (and no, weights per se don't stunt growth) plus as an health enthusiast I have found many answers to the common misconception of how the body works and how muscles are built and I have met many people who have been victims of these misconceptions. Even if you'll disagree with what I say just try to think about it and maybe even 1% of this post will help you find a balance and better health.

First of all: why bodybuilding is such an hot issue in this forum?
Simply because most of us are victims of a unhealthy lifestyle and diet and we found ourselves not fat but neither firm or slender. We feel we should have more shape, more firmness, more control of our body and better proportions. This leads us to bodybuilding because bodybuilding has become the standard of body transformation. Everyone who has too much belly fat, too much general flabbiness, too little muscular tone, postural weakness and lack of body proportions is made to believe that bodybuilding will be the solution. This is not the truth though.

While this will attempt to answer most questions and misconceptions about bodybuiding it might seems like not related to acne. But it is related to health and in my opinion acne and health are always connected and inseparable.

Studies have shown that better health and longevity are correlated with slenderness and thinness. While comparing people with poor muscular tone with people with good muscular tone seems to suggest muscles make us younger and healthier, this doesn't mean that the more muscles we have the healthier and more longeve we are. Slenderness and the right amount of muscles are correlated with better health and longevity. Bulkiness and "bigness" are not.

Muscles grow in different ways. Functional moderate stimulus tend to make the muscular fibers ticker. Eccentric and concentric movements typical of bb workouts tend to increase the cytoplasm volume of the muscle cells and pumping the muscles. Swimming, running, calisthenics, isometrics tend to produce long firm muscles whereas pumping heavy weights tend to produce short and balloned muscles for this simple physiological reason. Even overhead lifts tend to be different than standard pumping. So it's always a good idea to find a balance and never use one activity as the only stimulus we provide. This applies to most sport where the focus with technique might lead to adaptation and decrease physiological benefits and balanced transformations.

Muscle growth is optimized by fat gain. So the more we try to build our muscles the more the body tries to increase our body fat. There are many reason for this. One of this reasons is that kinetic energy is one-half mass times velocity squared. This means that in order to transfer more energy the body must be heavier not just stronger. We have just to think of sumo wrestlers or weights throwers and even olympic powerlifters. The increase in fat seems also to decrease the shock absorption of tendons, ligaments and joint which seems proportional to the amount of extra lean weight that frame must support.

This explains why it's possible to optimize body composition by losing a little fat and gaining a little musclesd at the same time, but it's impossible to gain lot of muscles and lose lot of fat at the same time. Muscle gain will always trigger and encourage fat gain and fat loss will always triggers and encourages muscle loss.

Many bbers over 30 tend to put on quite a few body fat. It is distributed all over and a good amount is intramuscular so they can still boast about their big physique as being all lean mass while there's a lot of fat distributed evenly and mixed with the muscles. They can be considered "fat builders" (which is different than simple sedentary, unaware "fat gainers") and for the very way our body is made it's almost unavoidable to become a "fat builder" once your only goal is to be big and get bigger.

Some become "fat builders" immediately. They eat and eat and boast about their growth which is actually way more fat than muscles.

Few people can dwell in the illusion of getting extremely lean and extremely muscular as long as they're in their 20's or so. But after years or sometimes months it depends of anabolic saturation a metabolic settling occurs. This has not to do with age in the specific sense but with time spent doing a certain repetitive task and experiencing certain physiological adaptations.

So some people follow a "fat builder" approach and they get immediately fat but claim it's only muscles, either because of delusion or because of bad caliper measurements.

Some people follow a "fat builder" approach and resist a bit more. They get quickly lean and muscular and believe they can push one down further and push the other up further indefinitely. It doesn't occurr

Some people follow a "fat builder" approach and resist a bit more. They get quickly lean and muscular and believe they can push one down further and push the other up further without indefinitely. It occurs but they believe this will last forever. After the metabolism settles they start either to gain fat or lose muscles.

Some people follow a "fat builder" approach and resist a bit more. They get quickly lean and muscular and believe they can push one down further and push the other up further without indefinitely. It occurs and they are among the few that can delay the metabolic settling. But eventually it occurrs. The bigger they have become during the "illusory" phase, the worse the control of their body composition will be after the settling. Most fat builders in their 40 are huge wardrobes with fat-saturated muscles. They still claim they're just mesomorphs with a big frame and a large constition and they're still huge mountains of muscles. If they're then they're on juices and this is affecting their health. If they're not then it's clear that they're fat.

This is where most doping, anabolic substances and other drugs come into action. They prevent the natural fat gain strictly correlated with muscular gain.

Most "fat builders" are young or beginners. Usually they can take advantage of a period in which the body is not adapted to the new body composition and the hypertrophic stimulus. Once the metabolism settle down and anabolic saturation creep in it is unavoidable to either accept a the rather normal moerate muscular growth obtained so far as their own physiological limit or to start to gain fat which is what the body do to support the big mass of the built muscles.

There's a physiological limit for muscle growth which is way way lower than what we're made to believe or what we see on magazines (for the records never judge real natural muscular mass by pics. Clearly when you have taken creatine, dark-tanned, covered your body in oil and flexed you appear to have a lot more muscles than what you really have)

Overcoming this limit doesn't only mean gaining fat but also reducing the health benefits of a physical activity. It can be seen on blood tests. Once the physiological limit for a proper amount of necessary muscle mass is overcome most health marks tend to worsen. HDL tends to lower, blood pressure tends to raise, red blood cells tend to shrink, cardio frequency tends to raise, glycemia tends to stay higher for longer, the heart develops a concentric hypertrophy so that the walls gets thicker but the heart volume remains the same.

Besides the body doesn't tolerate much extra weight on its frame. With the years whatever extra weight on the frame tends to be a major burden. Speed and coordination decreases, posture gets worse, ligaments and joints start to hurt or wear out and the spine gets compressed. Puffing for a simple flight of stair or a walking up the mountains becomes the norm.

Speed, coordination and explosiveness create an adaptation for maximum energy efficiency. Optimizing the muscle for energy efficiency means making them smaller. A marathon champion isn't so skinny because excessive cardio burned his muscle but because his body adapted the muscle to the maximum cardio efficiency possible by making the muscle smaller.

Big muscles are not needed in nature and are not welcome by the body. Strength most the time is a matter of neurological adaptation and massive strength increase can occurr without muscle growth while muscle growth can occur without strength increase. The hypertrophy obtained through increase in cytoplasmatic volume produces muscles that are larger but neither stronger nor firmer. Big and large muscles decrease explosiveness and speed in legs and arms which are actually things the body wants to optimize.

While a slow metabolism is a problem, having a "power furnace" instead of a body is not a good thing. The higher the metabolism is the higher will be metabolism wastes, inflammation, oxidative stress and aging.

Calipers are not a good indicator of real body fat. Calipers tend to work well with average bodies and localized subcutaneous fat. A big muscular body tends to distribute fat evenly and to hide it intraviscerally and intramuscularly. So most of the time people who believe to be big and lean are not so lean after all and unawaressly got through the process by which the increase in muscular size is accompained by an increase in body fat. Of course no method of body fat measuring is so far 100% reliable not even DEXA scans.

This means that illecit substances aside when we see people who are very big (their muscles seems swollen and round like balloons) they are also fat and when we see people who are impressively defined (definition tends to create the illusion of bigger muscles) they are also lower in muscular mass than what they claim.

Even a bodybuilder magazine with its common hypes had to admit that running generates far more physical efficiency than bodybuilding. Out of 10 tests 8 have been won by runners compared to bodybuilders. This seems to back up everything said so far. Increasing muscle size to make them larger and swollen is often not correlated with strength, requires the body to promote fat gaining, decreases physical efficiency and health marks, works against the body tendency to maintain the least weight over the frame in order to protect the structure and decreases energy efficiency which requires muscles to be smaller.

Needless to say that most bodybuilding tweaking are just useless.
You can't stop the natural adaptation to increase muscular mass which is fat gain.
Most strategies to prevent muscle loss when losing fat and fat gain when gaining muscles are rather irrelevant and inefficient except as long as we're not trying to overcome our own physiological limit for needed mass. Because of such physiological limits gulping down proteins is useless. Low doses are more than enoung since muscles are 84% water and we need no more than 10 extra grams of protein (extra proteins we tend already to get from our typical diet) to build muscles. Lot of proteins are not going to build your muscles just like throwing bricks randomly in a construction site is not going to build an house. Creatine is a muscle pumper which helps in recovery and its therefore used by runners and swimmers as well in small doses. As a muscle enhancer it just creates the illusion of increased mass by swollening the muscles. Lack of water is also an illusion, it is not leaness and as seen by real life examples it can't be sustained for long. Sooner or later a normal physiological retention of water will happen and the bubble will be bursted. Eating often is completely useless and has no effect on metabolism of thermic expenditure. Thermic expenditure is based on total food consumption not on numbers of eating sessions. Not eating carbs before going to bed is useless. Again the body will balance everything eventually. What's matter is on a daily basis not on a minute basis. Fat storage during the day means more fat oxidation at the end of the day, less fat storage during the day means less fat oxidation. Gorging on calories is useless if you hope to build lot of muscles and remain healthy and lean. It is on the other hand usefull if you want to build lot of muscles accepting the unavoidable fat gain and less health. The example of sumo wrestler is illuminating. Sumo wrestlers are not just fat but are very strong and have far more muscles than whatever person. Should they start to lose fat they would lose a lot of muscles too and there's nothing they can do about this; and manipulating carbs, calories, supplements, exercise would just be irrelevant. Gorgers are therefore "fat builders" and "fat building" has its own rules; like forcing yourself to eat a lot food indiscriminately and ending up consumign 3000-5000 calories a day.

Summary:

*Muscles grow easily and fat is burned easily when the body is adapting to new stimulus.
*The problem is believing that such situation will last for long.
*Soon there's an anabolic saturation and macronutrients including proteins start to go toward a fat gain pathway which is what the body naturally do when the muscle mass increases.
*Just looking at strength athletes shows how it's not quite possible to be naturally very muscular and naturally very lean (without anabolic substances).
*Maximum strength and muscular development is always associated with higher body fat and loss of definition.
*The very young and very hardcore few can keep adding mass without fat for a few years but soon reality will call their name.
*Most will accept that in order to gain further muscle mass they have to gain further body fat.
*Most won't realize that they are gaining fat because the distribution will be even. Hypertrofic stimulus allows fat to mix finely with muscles.
*Most will start to put on very visible fat (like a round belly) after their 30's as the burden on the metabolism caused by an arbitrary reckless caloric excess will slow down the metabolism abruptly and if they haven't learned how to balance calories (and most don't learn this since their religion is to gorge and eat as much as possible) they will soon balloon quickly and will get very fat.
*Because of this on their 50's they''ll be slow and pain suffering wardrobes with no definition.
*Some will start to use anabolic substance or others (insulin, dopamine ...) to avoid all of this.
*Most will remain lean enough but smaller in context and will be bloated, fat but bigger for the rest of the year.
*The maximum increase in hypertrofic efficency will greatly reduces cardiovascular efficiency and viceversa. Hence most of the cariovascular benefits of exercise will be lost
*Excessive muscular growth because of its link with unavoidable fat gain, leads to worsening of health marks or loss of benefits gained during a less extreme phase. HDL cholesterol, glycemia, blood pressure, corpuscolar volume, heart volume, red blood cells size, blood flowing, energy efficiency.
*Excessive weight wether from fat or from muscle is a burden for the body and since tendons and joints don't follow the same pace of rapid muscle growth, they tend to worn out and suffer under the excess weight



The conclusion and solution appear logic eventually. Since we have a maximum development of dry mass without fat gain we have to find the maximum muscular development which is compatible with a 9-12% of body fat while maintaining body weight, health and cardiovascular efficiency with a good cardio routine. When mass building becomes excessive cardio efficiency starts to suffer, health marks start to worsen and fat gain starts to creep in. Stopping at the right balance between natural leaness, cardiovascular efficiency and well developed muscular tone is the perfect solution. This will provide the muscular adequate slenderness which is associated with better flexibility, speed, longevity, health and mood ... unlike big size which is not.

P.S.
I think this should explain many contradictory concepts many have seen on themselves.
i.e. getting acne while bodybuilding (excessive calories, more metabolic active body fat than believe, decreased energy efficiency, central nervous fatigue leading to stress, increase in metabolic wastes) losing fat and gaining muscles at the same time, feeling unhealthy while bodybuilding, bloatedness, feeling fat even if calipers says 10%, worsening of health marks after getting active in the gym, disappointment about the kind of development we're experiencing, girls claiming they're getting too bulky even if their mass didn't change much, fattier people being stronger than lean ones, slenderness vs. skinniness vs. firmess vs. bloatedness vs. bulkiness vs. rippedness vs. flabbiness vs. fatness, getting the body of Brad Pitt, injuries and others.

Unhealthy living and excesses in youth

This is a consideration I had considering how many of my peers are devoted to a lifestyle of getting drunk, using drugs and how they're considered the normal way to be young.

First of I want to point out that the concept of generation is a flawed meaningless one.
The same birth years "produces" people that are as different as their living experiences, interests and environment has been. So the concept that there's a definite "youth culture" is absurb as it is the morally suspect and intellectual dishonest belief that such is not even a product of culture but of biology (let's just ignore such nonsense because no insult would be enough for such heresy)

So this is not about my age, their age or my being different than the stereotype associate with my age, but about the unquestionable fact that we are all individuals and that it's not age that determines our lifestyle choice. This is relevant to this topic as we're talking about healthy lifestyle here and as we know that an healthy lifestyle is something young people can easily choose and as we know that such choice is still compatible with fun.

The problem with youth and drugs and alcohol is a problem, in my opinion, created by the very stereotype which is in turn backed up by what believing the stereotype does to people. In other words a vicious cycle.

But let me explain: the stereotype is that youth should be made of excesses NOT because that's the only way to have fun but because that's the only time in your life that will have such fun.
This is backed up by the fact that once people believe to be out of their youth (and this varies individually according to how sick and aching a person has become) they will feel like all the fun is over. The problem is that such "apathetic existence" suddenly appearing at a relatively still young age is the product of those excesses. Can you see how this is a cycle becoming herself.

Seeing a 30 year old who claims to be old, to not be fit anymore for fun and to accept an existence of boredome disguised as maturity is disgusting enough that any sane person would do anything to avoid being like that. OR would do anything to enjoy life still it can be enjoyed.

It is all a big illusion in truth. Unhealthy lifestyle generates sick apathetic people who are unable to enjoy life and have fun anymore. Such people can't have fun anymore because they think of fun as the excesses their body can't tolerate anymore. But this very same people create the stereotype that fun is made of excesses till your body can tolerate them because after that you're old and if you haven't enjoyed life when you could, you wasted it.

In other words the problem with alcohol, drugs, late nights and youth is a practical problem.
Stupid people who have tried to make this a moral ethical problem have just worsened everything.
Their arguments are usually more stupid than the argument of those who defend such lifestyle and their moral hypocrisy and worse yet ageism is unbereable.

The problem, once again, is that there are too many people that should be active, full of energy, creativity, joy and should have lot of fun that are instead living an apathetic, boring, miserable life.
Young people (as all people should unless an unhealthy lifestyle destroy their pleasure for life) don't want to be like that and don't want to have anything to do with that. So they convince themselves that becoming an apathetic zombie is their destiny and that as long as they can they should have the most destructive fun possible. Only that it's that destructive fan that have turned those people into zombie. Unfortunately the zombies themselves claim it's all normal, they have just aged, and they're glad that at least when they could the have enjoyed life.

It's all sad and pathetic and insulting to our poor body as we blame it for something we have induced and created.

So this is the principle:
How many people in their 40's do you know who live the late night life made of alcohol, drugs of 18 year old? Chance are you know none and if you know some he/she is probably considered a failure and pathetic by the very youngsters that live such a life. In other words a myth is created where youth is considered a specific natural transitory stage devoted to whatever excess before passing to what would wrongly be considered "maturity" (wrongly considered of course, maturity has actually nothing to do with age, stages, overly seriousness or how bored we are) which is seen clearly as a stage where all the fun is banned or strongly reduced. Seen from such perspective where life is made of distinct obligatory stages the "adult life" appears rightly as the saddest thing ever: 10 years of destructive fun and 50 years of boring apathy.

Some people keep accepting in this idiotic model by rationalizing it believing that as you get older you find specific and different ways to have fun. It's an idiocy. It just takes to see how people really love to realize this is not true and that what this model produces is the horrific prospective of living 10 years of conformist destructive fun and 50 years of boredome.

In other words people have become victims of a model that is telling them that it's normal to get apathetic, sick and tired as you turn 30 and actually that becoming a zombie is a symptom of maturity and therefore that their chance to enjoy their existence is living of destructive extremes those 10 years and accepting decadence and misery in the following ones. I have never heard someone living such a life claiming <I do this because it's my passion and my realization> what they always claim is <I better do this till I can>. In fact some of them force themselves to live such a life as if they felt morally obliged with themselves to "enjoy" those few years, the only years where enjoyment is possible.

So let me propose the real model opposing this elaborate cultural fairy tale:

The person who REALLY enjoy life is the person who at 40 is doing the same things he used to do at 18

Whenever excess which we can toleratore for few years and that we are brainwashed to consider the real quintessence of fun before we will turn into retarded zombie (i.e. when maturity hits) is not something we can maintain for long and abandonining it leaves us without alternative except boredome and hence the acceptance that we just aged and that's the way it is supposed to be.

The quintessence of fun is fun, pleasure, enjoyment that is compatible with our health, with our essence in its totality and it's therefore something that exists long term. It's "eternal fun" because nothing can stop it.

Destructive fun is stopped by body tolerance that comes to an end.
Destructive fun is fueled by the belief that you must enjoy life till you can.
The end of the tolerance of the abused body creates the myth that indeed we are made to have fun only for a small amount of our life and that therefore we must force ourselves or we will have never lived. This creates the same effect that occurs when you don't desire something until you realize you might lose it forever, at which point you become obsessive and go to unhealthy extremes. This means that what those people experience is not fun but fear, fear of losing the ability to feel "alive", fear that must exorcized by abusing the body to the extreme as in proving to themselves that it can still tolerate the abuse, that it is still alive and young.

And actually what these people don't realize is that only when you fill your life with real long term passions and fun you're enjoying life for the first time. Youngsters that keep living like that will be "old relic" at 30 because instead of building passional fun that will keep entertaining and fulfilling them for 60 years they're creating the foundation to experience a long, slow, boring and sad old age starting at just 30.

So you should never be defensive about your lifestyle, about your not smoking, not drinking, not vomiting in the middle of the night and going to sleep at 6 am under the effect of drugs. If you have found long term fun that won't tax your body but will actually refresh and stimulates it you have really found the fountain of youth, you're younger than all the them, you'll be as young in 60 years and you're really enjoying life and having fun ... which is something they have not yet found and will probably never find.

You DO need water

Lately I have been reading how the drinking of 1-2 liters of water a day is a myth.
Many have been saying there's no evidence you need that much water or even said that as long as you eat enough food you get all the liquids you need without ever drinking water. At the same time many have claimed that water helps them. Models claim that drinking lot of water is what their skin so good, certain writers have sad that drinking enough water fight tiredness and even certain diseases.
But the detractors said, the X glasses of water day is nothing but a meaningless myth, we don't need to drink water and water doesn't do anything.

Yesterday I wasn't feeling good.
It's like as if my body was retaining heat and I felt very tired and almost like fainting.
So I went to the E.R and there I was told that I was deeply dehydrated and they gave me a lot of phlebos of physiologic liquid. In the evening after so many phlebos I felt better again, I had more energy, didn't feel neither cold or hot and I swear my skin and hair were better too.

The doctor told me to eat at least 3 liters of water a day and don't believe the nonsense.
In fact I had stopped drinking as much as I used to in order to give the theory that we don't need water a chance. But I didn't stop drinking, I just drank less ... like 3-4 glasses a day or even a liter a day. And yet it was enough for a trip to the E.R.

I don't care what disbelievers say about we not needing much water, I now know that the more we drink the better (as long as we don't drink water to death) and I will drop my skepticism about "water as a cure" books and their authors claims.