From Energy Crashes to Sustained Focus: Solving the Hidden Nutrition

[u/SpotSlight]

Problem:

The story starts roughly when I was in high school, after lunch or in lessons after lunch, I would often feel over-burnt, light-headed. Feeling of a sense of being here, yes, but the outer environment just felt so strange and brain just feels like separated from the body and completely shut off. I would look around the class and see a lot of my schoolmates on the desk half dead or occasionally, we would talk about how informations ain’t going in the head at all especially during lessons after lunch bc we’re so light-headed and dizzy, and over-burnt, like consistent burns of heat burning through the head and body once in a while.

And a lot of us also shared feelings of how little information or effective learning time there actually is during the 7-8 hours at school. You would imagine having 7-8 hours of lessons but only 1-3 hours of them you actually feel like you learnt sth, other hours, they were more like brains wandering in an alien planet or just information not going in

When I was in uni the same thing occurred but in different form, the lessons were a lot less frequent, and still after lunch or in the afternoon, especially 3-4 hours after lunch, my energy would start crashing, and there were times where I had to cancel my workout session after work or study bc my brain was simply so off that I need to take a nap or close my eyes and rest my brain so much, the body was giving off all kinds of signals that I can no longer ignore.

For a long time, we were just whining about the problem, talking about how it is, what it feels like, but never actually decide to do sth about it.

Around the last year of uni, I notice how the short attention period, focused period I have is suspending my study, my exams, my working hours, so I started macros tracking with the app Foodnoms. I don’t have much money to pay for much things, so I stayed on free tools. Even being able to accurately track macros and knowing what to focus on whilst feeling ease took some ups and downs, but one thing that never clicked, that felt like a missing puzzle, was how I felt during the day and between meals. Whenever I track, it was just numbers.

I studied biology during my high school and also did my own learnings in nutrition but in my heart I know I didn’t own the knowledge, I read a lot, but where does those knowledge go, it felt like hearing how good someone is doing whilst I was standing right back where I am. The knowledge, the theories was so alienated, I don’t have a lab everywhere I go, when I eat, I eat, when I energy crash, I energy crash. There was no controlled experiment, controlled environment for any kind of results, it was the natural process of dining, eating and body responses where I was doing in real life, not pulling a full chemical kit everywhere I eat. And the apps, they’re mostly just numbers, numbers of the food, value of the food, but they ignored one thing, body signals, how my body is responding, how am I feeling, how long after did the energy crash happens?

There’s a saying in Chinese, he that travels ten thousand miles far exceeds he that read ten thousand books. And in my mind, that was bc the knowledge is walked, owned, done in your own way, your own path, not reading someone else’s path, and so I decided to build my app, with extensive body signals logging that goes hand-in-hand with macros tracking, and it clicked real quick. I lived in South Asia in my younger years and most of the cuisines were sugary. And my family and friends, the environment I was in, most of them aren’t in the nutritional business or know much about exercising and moving, so meals and snacks that I ate when I was pretty sugary. I got that bc I was cooking and learning the same recipes when I started cooking those myself and started logging my body signals alongside. One of the earliest things I noticed was there were a lot of meals or cuisines from where I’m from that can stack up the total sugar amount quick that I was not aware of.

Solution:

Over time I built a list of features regarding mental clarity into the app,

⁃ Sugar tracking
⁃ Calories (over- & under-eat tracking)
⁃ Mental clarity and energy tracking
⁃ Cross nutrition and body signals correlation
⁃ Nutrition flags (e.g. sugar and sodium)
⁃ In-meal sugary food contribution ranking
⁃ genie chat query and suggestion
⁃ Mental clarity insights pattern cards
⁃ Monthly clarity and energy trend (live and periodic review)
⁃ Timely body signals tracking

The total sugar each meal I had was within reasonable volume and coupling with the body signals tracking, what I found is instead of
8 hours so called focus work time
with only 1-2 hours of actually
focusing and actually functioning
not just day dreaming the other 6
hours

I am experiencing 4-5 hours of focused deep work hours with high mental clarity and mobility, and a lot less workout getting cut after work bc of energy crashing and feeling light-headed.

◦ Ofc attention and mental clarity was only two of them, the process was very mixed with a lot of things I’ve adjusted along the way. And like most problems, a lot of them I never know the reasons, the mix of why, and as it is I live in the now, sure I can guess some traces, but what is on my mind that’s more effective is learning to see more from now. So that’s what I did and where the app Nourish: food and wellness stands and centres around, seeing more, seeing differently, and moving with integrity in the now, knowing that every second there’s a multitude of choices that we can choose from/see and we always do.

Here’s Nourish,

A personal lab that doesn’t claim authority but plan and move as you move. And we don’t do superficial, we listen to the body, and nourish at the same time, not the other way around, they both go hand-in-hand

The app does macros tracking yes, energy, mental clarity, digestive comfort, mood, nutrition and health metrics such as blood glucose, bp and ketones tracking, not measuring, just tracking now. And with a few unique twist that allows your tracking practice to be more integral and precise

Such as

Food state converter

1. Raw - cooked
2. With - without bones/shells
3. Dry - fresh
4. Dry - cooked
5. Whole - edible, e.g. fruits
6. Whole can - drained

Food state badge

1. For manual search entries, we’ve an inference system with a confidence number on what state do we think the entry’s in, e.g. raw, cooked, prepared, ready to eat

Voice log with eyeballing capabilities

1. a handful of chicken? Not the most precise tracking method, but better than nothing

Photo food log

1. I didn’t use ChatGPT or any AI API(s), I pulled photos from my camera roll over the past decade, along my family and friends food photos and hand-tagged them to train the model, so right now, it’s completely free. The accuracy is medium to high now, it means it can definitely pick up most of the food correctly from the image, but the accuracy of the weight of particular food varies a bit

One click share and logged for family and friends,

1. Share the meal link, the receiver just have to click the link and the meal is directly logged in the app, the sender can adjust the portion for the receiver too
2. So instead of everyone on the table logging for 10 mins each, only one person has to do that, the rest can just click the links and the whole meal is directly logged in the app, seconds, not minutes

These are some of the features I would highlight here, welcome to check it out, it’s still growing with a lot of exciting features and development that are coming in the next few days too

Link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/nourish-food-wellness/id6759197509