"What-If?" style planning feature
hey all,
I've been working with tracking in Cronometer for a few weeks now and have been absolutely loving it. The tracking and meal creation tools are especially useful and robust, however, I think that there is a big opportunity for an awesome feature that would be VERY useful for a lot of people (myself included). I'm imagining some sort of daily "what-if?" style planning feature that would allow you to build sample meal plans for a day. So you could see, what happens if I don't eat breakfast, what happens if I have a beer after work, etc.
(A little bit of context here, I'm 26M and very active. My primary use for Cronometer is making sure that I'm getting enough calories and a mostly balanced macro split in my diet, but I think that this feature would be equally useful for people in a weight loss context.)
What inspired this post is that I've gotten a few of my go-to recipes imported into cronometer, and have been doing some math in a separate spreadsheet to try to figure out the best combination of these meals and snacks to hit my macro and calorie goals.
So, in my context, I would be able to put together a daily meal plan, and see how far I am away from my daily calorie goals, or if I've hit them. In a weight loss context, the opposite could of course also be true, you could make a daily meal plan, see where you might be over your numbers, see where you can make changes, etc.
I add meals into my diary as i eat them so I get a retroactive look at how I'm doing to hit my calorie and macro goals, and the "ask the oracle" tool seems to fill a similar need, but i think that a true planning tool would be an enormous value add to all kinds of users. I would be more than happy to expand on any of these ideas, and if any other folks have a good system for planning that I'm missing, or if this feature is somewhere that I can't find please let me know!