[tansey]

I think the oversimplified nutrition analytics is actually killing one of the biggest potential sources of insight from personal analytics. The key then is having a large, accurate database of nutritional information so you can see which fundamental ingredients a users is constantly ingesting.

Other than that, I totally agree. Someone please make this app-- then let me do the machine learning for you. :)

[ivankirigin]

Users won't input that data. I care a lot about this, and found using apps like LoseIt to track food way too much overhead.

I know some people are trying food tracking via taking a photo. Taking a photo per meal is a lot of overhead! That said, 4 Hour Body recommends it to stick to a nutrition goal.

Also, I disagree with your premise. I know what I shouldn't eat, and the main questions I want answered are what correlates to my making bad decisions. How does sleep relate? Alcohol? Being around friends? Tracking specifically what I eat seems irrelevant.

[DLarsen]

I've been taking a similar approach to a side/hobby project that relates to personal spending/budgeting.

I am seeking to apply the "easy data entry" + "subjective good/ok/bad" measures to help folks discover patterns of bad spending decisions. While most every budgeting/spending app will show you "how much you have left" or "safe to spend" the real measure of improvement is whether you made good decisions or bad decisions given your life circumstances. This also has the effect of softening the penalty for missing data. If you miss some data, you just pick up where you left off. You're not trying to balance your budget. You're tracking decisions. Although I'm not (yet) biting off the notion of correlating it with other personal analytics, that's an interesting extension of the idea.

I'm really convinced that a behavioral approach to spending/budgeting would lead to longer lasting positive changes than fretting about exceeding your grocery budget by $19 due to unexpected company joining you for lunch.

The general gist is described here: http://www.spendlight.com/land-3.html

[jlees]

The issue is that of avoidance. If I have to tell an app I've been bad, I'm more likely to avoid telling it at all. (Like not getting on the scale when one knows the weight won't be good news.)

Sure, highly motivated users will track everything, but it doesn't take much to leave the highly motivated state. There's also the angle that knowing you have to report in with bad news might stop you doing the bad thing in the first place, but when the penalty for not reporting in is nil, it loses some of its power. Perhaps approaches that use human accountability or other reward systems (eg. GymPact) could help here.

[DLarsen]

Good point. This is absolutely essential.

In some circles I've described it as "a money tracking tool built for couples" and that's true. This all emerged from a chart my wife and I had been using on our fridge. We wanted to address the decision making progress as a couple and not beat ourselves up over specific failures (impulsive spending, false bargains, etc), but try to improve our process for budgeting and spending money.

[tansey]

> Users won't input that data.

Sites like MyFitnessPal and MyNetDiary would likely disagree. They have hundreds of thousands of users. However, I agree that if you're in generally good health then it probably is too high of a burden.

> I know what I shouldn't eat

I'd argue you probably do not know what you should or should not eat. Sure, in general you know you should avoid eating candy for every meal, but I suspect you don't really know which particular ingredients are resulting in a change of your state.

For instance, many people are gluten intolerant for years before realizing it. If you were able to track foods to the approximate level of knowing the level of gluten in your body at a given time, you could identify gluten as a cause of some symptoms. I would also make similar arguments about the long-term effects of certain diets (semi-vegetarian, low-carb, etc.).

I guess there is a divide between the kind of myopic analytic insight you're looking for and the more long-term ones I'm interested in. Both are valuable, but they require different data sources.

[enraged_camel]

>>Sites like MyFitnessPal and MyNetDiary would likely disagree. They have hundreds of thousands of users.

That doesn't mean much. I used to use Fitocracy to track my workouts, and while the app itself was very useful, the data entry part absolutely sucked and it was ultimately the reason I gave up on it and went back to pen and paper tracking.