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Initial Reflection on Dietary Needs

First Published: 8 January 2025

Draft 2: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned in a fair number of musings, I want to be better at fueling my body. That means that I’m going to aim for a few goals:

both lets me get some estimates and gives me the actual links to the book where the USDA lays out their explicit recommendations. Unfortunately, those PDFs do not give citations, but I will trust that the data are at least generally good. With that in mind, the goals I should be hitting:

Ok, so that’s interesting and good enough. It’s always nice to confirm that there’s a large range of completely acceptable values for every macronutrient. The micros I will assume I can hit if I get a diverse diet in, at least for now. Now comes the much harder part: generating an actual diet.

I think that having the list of colors is a thing I need to do when plotting literally any meal, and especially while shopping. I think that it’s also probably best to have as much of what I’m cooking as things that I can generally do in batches that requires minimal in person effort. The absolute ideal, is of course, something like the classic crock pot meal, which is a turn on whenever and come back to whenever, with no real time considerations other than a floor.

I know myself well enough to know that I do, legitimately, enjoy cooking when I can, and that I hate following recipes. Those two conditions make a lot of meal planning hard, as does my tendency to forget things when they’re out of sight and to fall into chaos at the slightest provocation. However!

Hope is not lost. I do know myself well enough to know that when I have a list, even if it’s vague, I can often follow along with them, especially when I have a reason to do so.4

I think that this may be more than a single blog post is able to have, but I will definetly try to start making vague measurements in my recipes, so that I can both recreate them and see what the health information in them is. Additionally, that can let me start experimenting with different changes to each recipe. For instance, yesterday I baked a loaf of sandwich bread where I substituted yogurt for milk and added some almond flour.

Draft 1: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned a fair amount in the recent musings, I want to be better about feeding myself. There are any number of reasons for this, but if I’m being honest, it’s mostly due to the loss of my mother.5 With that in mind, there are some general guidelines that I’m going to try to keep in mind going forward.6

Alrighty, that’s a pretty doable set of items. With that in mind, let’s start being explicit with some numbers9. Thankfully, Uncle Sam has us covered with that. These days, I do unfortunately think that I am Inactive to Low Active based on their terms, though that is something I’d like to change:10

I’m realizing that I’m losing the thread, so let’s restart.


  1. though, I could easily believe that my brain is in the top 2 to 3 percent of calorie usage, in which case would need to be higher.

  2. all in mg/kg, all RDA

  3. more solid

  4. like, for instance, this whole blog post and my general desire to eat better

  5. as so much of what I do is these days

  6. will be looking things up really quickly to make sure that I don’t miss anything super important.

  7. Yes, I’m well aware that the average American gets far more than enough protein in their diet, but I’m not average

  8. says that trans fats are banned, interestingly. Looking at the abstract of this meta analysis, seems like that’s not necessarily true.

  9. for the macros, in particular

  10. N.B. I am rounding everything, because I don’t like unnecessary precision, and don’t really believe that my body is a bomb calorimeter (unfortunately).

  11. which I kind of am

  12. which, wildly enough, is on the low end. The USDA recommends 10-25 percent from protein

  13. USDA wants 20 to 35 percent