2 days ago
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- I built an Airtable database to plan meals before eating.
- Food planning helped reduce takeout and decision fatigue.
- A simple database can quiet food noise without diet apps or pills.
I built a custom Airtable database to track my food planning. If you knew me as a younger adult, you'd realize how ridiculous that idea is. For years, my "food planning" consisted of deciding which fast-food drive-thru to hit on my way home from work.
Until I got married, I ate almost every meal away from home. When I did eat at home, it was leftovers from previous restaurant visits or pizza delivery from New Jersey's excellent pizza shops. Often, breakfast either consisted of Dunkin' Donuts or the previous night's pizza. One Saturday, my buddy and I went to the mud races (a form of motorsport where vehicles like dune buggies on steroids race through muddy terrain for fun and profit), fueled by a pizza that had lived in the back seat of the car since the previous evening.
But eating out changed around pandemic time. We stopped going out to restaurants. My favorite Tuesday discount sushi visit was off the table, since the sushi place was closed. We started trying to cook at home.
Eating at home provided a bit of a health awakening. First, I didn't feel quite as ick as I almost always did from that constant diet of fast food and pizza. I then started to modify my eating more completely, avoiding refined sugar and flour. By the time I cut out the constant supply of my beloved baked goods, I started to lose weight.
This is where food planning came in. Most diets I'd participated in over the years promoted tracking what you eat. Whether it was calories, macros, or points, you recorded it after the fact. You still had to decide every meal, day after day.
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But planning means figuring out your food choices before you eat.
"Our stressed and hungry brains are not reliable when it comes to making good food decisions at meal time. Give your future self the gift of a plan," said Karen Kennedy, author of "Hack Your Blood Sugar." She is a certified nutritionist and an integrative and functional nutrition certified practitioner, an advanced practice credential earned after getting specialized training in root-cause medicine and holistic nutrition.
Kennedy also said that her patients who meet their health goals plan most of their meals. She's not the only believer in meal planning.
"In my experience, pre-planning meals reduces what I call nutritional decision fatigue, the constant low-level mental negotiation around food that quietly drains willpower, increases impulsive eating, and disconnects people from eating with intention rather than emotional convenience," said Dr. Naheed Ali.
Ali has three doctorates: an MD, a PhD, and a SciD. He completed Harvard Medical School's lifestyle medicine training program and is also certified in clinical research by the National Institutes of Health.
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As I discovered, once I stopped ordering pizza on demand, planning food also helps when you need to create a shopping list. I'd used shopping lists before, of course. How else would you know what you needed to buy at Home Depot? But who knew you could also use the same tool at a supermarket? Actually, through most of the 1990s and early 2000s, I don't think I ever went inside a supermarket. Ever. Wawa and Taco Bell were my supermarkets.
But you can't, or at least shouldn't, live like that forever. At some point, living like college students has to change as you get older and realize there are only so many all-nighters you can pull, and only so much junk and fast food you can safely consume without permanent damage.
My wife is an RN, a very patient RN, and after years of listening to her talk about health and wellness, some of it rubbed off. Besides, I love her and want to be with her for as long as possible. Better eating is part of that. And, as you might imagine, I found a technical solution to help me out.
Using Airtable
Now, not only can I plan my shopping list, I can even tell you that my wife and I ate oatmeal 189 times this year, and had cottage cheese 184 times. We eat just about the same amount of blackberries, strawberries, and grapes. Bell peppers and carrots are regular eats, but mixed veg is by far our most commonly consumed vegetable choice.
That information is available because not only do we track our food for the next day, we also keep a log of how often we choose those foods, along with where we buy them.
We do this using a cloud service called Airtable. I built this database back in 2021, and we've been using it since.
I chose Airtable over Notion (which I use to track other projects) because Airtable is like a low-code relational database. Notion uses page-based blocks, so every entry in Notion is a page in its unstructured and not-really-relational database.
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To be clear, I could have used one of the thousands of food-tracking apps out there, but I wanted one that was tailored precisely to my needs. I didn't want to track food after it was consumed. I wanted to track food based on whether it's grain, protein, vegetable, fat, fruit, or condiment. I didn't want to enter calories or macros. I just wanted to choose the food.
So, each day, Airtable creates a form. This is my food plan for today. As you can see below, there are views for both my wife and me. We have foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as a mini-meal option (usually a protein shake or more vegetables).
Each night, I use a little script called Build Day that builds out a blank day.
This script uses Airtable's automation feature to insert a set of standard values into fields for that day's record. Then the planning process consists of clicking on the field and choosing a food.
The automations are fairly simplistic. They consist of a sequence of actions that push values into the fields. Actions chain to other actions, so when Airtable is done creating tomorrow's breakfast records, it moves on to tomorrow's lunch records, and so on.
Now that the tool is built, using it takes just a minute or so. The biggest challenge is the discussion my wife and I have about what our main lunch protein will be.
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About a month ago, we decided to swap our big meal from dinner to lunch, and this switch seems to be working out pretty well. We realized we were often eating our big meal of the day quite late. This way, we have time to eat and digest the main meat, fish, or poultry protein source earlier in the day.
Our food at night is almost always fruit, some cottage cheese, some vegetables, and an ounce of fat. Simple, easy, and surprisingly filling.
You could vibe code this, but why?
I put this system together before generative AI was a thing. Today, you could vibe code a web app in a matter of hours. But why bother?
Airtable is robust and managed by the company. Bugs might exist in the automations, but will rarely be found in the underlying database layer. Everything is deterministic, so you can count on the tool performing as expected. Plus, the whole thing costs only $12/month, so it's not even as costly as some of the typical food-tracking apps.
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"Generic health apps give you what they think you need. With Airtable, you can describe your food planning system in plain language and get a real app built around your data -- one where AI agents can actually do work for you, from logging meals to spotting patterns over time," Andrew Busse, VP of AI operations at Airtable told me.
As you can see from Busse's comment, Airtable also has AI. But as much as AI agents could do the work, I haven't needed to use them for my tracker. Frankly, I prefer it that way, at least for this project. There's at least one tech place in my life where AI hasn't managed to intrude, and I don't have to spend my time begging an inanimate machine to build my app.
There's no doubt that the time/benefit analysis is strong in this one. I built the tool one weekend back in 2021, and have used it every day for the past five years. That's a pretty solid result from some minimal engineering. Plus, all that takeout and restaurant food adds up. Eating simple vegetables and protein has been great for our food budget.
Food noise
Food noise is a fairly new term describing the relentless thoughts about food that many people experience. In "The Day the Food Noise Died," an April article in The New York Times, author Gina Kolata described how the constant internal chatter about food distracts people who are struggling with their weight.
In the article, she discussed how food noise could be described as internal voices urging people to eat and then shaming them for eating. My grandmother was like that. If I didn't eat my whole meal at holiday gatherings, she was personally insulted. But then later, she'd tell me I could do with losing a little weight.
In any case, food noise is like having my grandmother living in your head 24/7. The main premise of the article was that once folks started taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, the food noise stopped or was substantially reduced.
I haven't taken any of those drugs, but I've found that food planning reduces a lot of the food chatter.
Not only can we plan our grocery list, but we also enter the day knowing we need to take something out of the freezer to thaw. We have a quick five-minute conversation about tomorrow's food. Gone are the 20-minute debates about what we're in the mood for for dinner, which inevitably ended in an emergency call to the local Domino's.
Would planning tomorrow's meals ahead of time reduce food stress in your household? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
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