Bodybuilding Forums

Updated Diet Log Spreadsheet: January 17, 2011.

I've often repeated in these forums that your day-to-day weight fluctuations aren't really relevant except that they provide statistical data. What matters are your trends: your average body fat percentages and weights. The problem a lot of us have -- including me! -- is getting rid of that "noise" and tracking the real trends underlying our increases in lean mass, reductions in body fat, and overall weight. So I created a spreadsheet in the hopes that it might be useful for automatically figuring out your fat weight, lean weight, charting your progress, and maybe a bit more.

I've filled out this link with a month's worth of bogus data so you can get an idea how it works. ONLY FILL OUT THE PARTS OF THE SPREADSHEET IN YELLOW.

As to what those fields are, basically the idea behind this spreadsheet is to track your weight, fat, and lean weight over time to help you keep your stats moving the right way and give you early indications when you need to adjust your plan. To get a better estimate of your body's "true weight", you need to apply a tiny bit of statistics to your sample size of one. The one I chose, for ease of math, is a 10-day moving average. This way, you could easily do the math by hand by moving decimal places and doing some simple addition & subtraction.

I think most of the colums are self-explanatory except for the "Fat Variance" and "Lean Variance" columns. These will light up red or green corresponding to your current averages. For instance, let's say you weigh in a few grams of lean mass heavier and a few grams of fat mass lighter today than your 10-day weighted average. Both of these fields will then show up green: you have lost fat, and gained muscle, compared to your 10-day running average. Let's say your lean weight exactly matches your moving average, but your fat increased a few grams. The "Fat Variance" column will light up red to draw your attention to the fact that you've put on fat compared to your 10-day moving average.

Dude, thanks for the effort!!!
A diet log is very important during any phase especially to track your macronutrients.
Again thanks

This sounds really cool. I think I'll try it out. I've been using an app on my iTouch called True Weight. It has a similar function but only tracks raw weight and not lean muscle or fat.

vrsandersjr wrote:It has a similar function but only tracks raw weight and not lean muscle or fat.

That's exactly my complaint about most of the apps out now, and what drove me to want to build a spreadsheet. Even the best of the apps tend to count fiber toward carbohydrate calories for the day, ignore body fat percentage, and provide all-but-worthless weight projection tools. With the right tool, you can know exactly what tweaks to make to your diet to meet your goals.

So today, I added macronutrient counts and evaluation scripts based upon a 90% compliance rate. I think I need to move the compliance rate from being baked into the equations into its own field, so that a user can say they want to be 80% compliant, or whatnot. Also have to figure in the carb-ups somehow without making it too complicated...

--Matt B.

It's obvious there are a number of defects in the worksheet at present. For instance, the fat percentage column is an absolute, rather than a percentage... and changing it to a percentage will affect every other calculation in the spreadsheet. Also, some of the calculations that should carry over whatever the last value was if you skip a day currently don't, and others don't compensate for lack of numbers correctly (they'll display a broken calculation if a stat is missed for a day). Also, go/no go triggers are opposite from what they should be in some cases, like if you under-consume protein it's showing up as green rather than red.

Anyway, the lean weight calcs seem to be working correctly. And it's interesting to learn that the Omron hand-held fat meter treats glycogen storage as lean weight. That's something I never would have learned had I not been tracking every morning and been able to see the lean & fat trends coalescing out of the spreadsheet.

If anyone else is using it -- though I doubt anybody is -- I'll come out with a new version next month after I get a month's worth of stats into this version. Sure, there are some annoying bugs, but the insight into what's going on with my body is worth it!

--Matt B.

Brilliant work man I will definitely be using this app. Thanks for taking the time to post it.

Hi Friends,

Thanks to share with us this diet. It is very helpful for us and i'll want to do this.
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Thanks for your hard work on this, but I can't enter my numbers. It won't let me erase the numbers on the columns.

You need to "save a copy" of the spreadsheet in your own Google Apps workspace. Go to "File" and select "Make A Copy".

Once you have your own copy, you can adjust it at will.

I've updated it for 2011. Just a few tweaks here and there... it works well for me. I never got the KG vs. lbs thing working right, though, so for now it only tracks weight and fat in pounds. Hasn't been that big a deal to me; if someone wants to adjust it to make kilograms or stones work correctly, have at it and let me know what you've changed!

--Matt B.