As I’ve mentioned before, I started working on losing weight last fall. This decision was mainly prompted by my desire to be at an ideal weight before I became pregnant. Since I had a couple of years to reach this goal, it was easy for me to take this fairly slow and after the first couple of months, it wasn’t very stressful (retraining myself on what an appropriate portion size was hard and in the beginning I did go to bed hungry).

I’m now securely in the “normal” weight category and very close to what I’m going to consider my ideal. Now that I’ve almost reached my goal weight, I’m starting to examine other aspects of my diet.

One reason I love Nutribase, the application I’ve been using to help with my weight loss, is that it doesn’t just stick to counting calories. It also shows me how many calories are coming from protein, carbs and fat. In addition, it suggests goals for other nutrients such as vitamins and minerals and then calculates each day how close I come to those goals.

After analyzing the nutritional information for about a month, I’ve discovered that I’m often a little shy of my protein goal and, if I don’t take a multi-vitamin or some other “enriched” food, usually don’t get enough Vitamin E, Iron and Zinc. At this point, I’m not too concerned about the deficiencies. However, I want to start figuring out how to boost these area for when I’m pregnant. I’m sure once I’m pregnant I’ll be put on prenatal vitamins. However, I’d prefer to get as many of my nutrients as possible from real food.

While Nutribase does have the ability to sort by various nutritional elements, the display is a little awkward. A couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that I could use the categories in my recipe wiki to see what recipes are a “high source” or “good source” of a particular nutrient (the FDA has specific guidelines on these labels — click here to see them).

I’m just starting on this project so at the moment most of the recipes in the wiki don’t have a nutritional breakdown and even fewer have nutritional categories attached to them. However, I have started entering this information for the recipes I frequently prepare. Eventually, I’ll be able to go to the Nutrition Search page, click on the High in Zinc link and it’ll give me a list of recipes that contain at least 20% of the DV for zinc.

I think this project should be great fun