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EventsWhat new feature would make you use the membership every day?
, medical review by Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD
in About membership, Surveys 
Meal plan?
What new feature would make you visit our membership site every day?
We asked our members this week and here are the most asked-for features:
1. Meal plans
Members want lots of meal plans of different types, tailored to their low-carb lifestyle, intermittent-fasting, keto, vegetarian, and dairy-free for example, with ready-made shopping lists.
We have been working on this for months and in January your meal-plan dreams will come true! And, later in 2017, members will be able to design their own personalized meal plans too, and shopping lists will be automatically created.
2. A tracking tool
Members want to track their progress, for example their weight, waist circumference, blood sugar, and carbohydrate intake.
We too like the tracking-tool idea, however making an awesome one is hard. What’s the main reason you want a Diet Doctor tracking tool when similar tools already exists? Please tell us in the comments below.
3. A forum
Members want to connect with other low carbers, for example through a forum.
We also want to make this happen, but we’re not sure about the forum idea. Is there a better way? If you have an idea, please tell us in the comments below.
Thank you for your help
We appreciate you taking the time to tell us what you want. Every month, we make decisions about what to work on next, and your suggestions help us make better decisions.
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I must say though that the meal plans sound like a fabulous idea!
Thank you!!
I would suggest you create a few macro categories for the metrics. This then helps to design the member's dashboard. For example, what companies do is use these typical categories to track the "health of a company": cost ($ spent per time interval), productivity (units produced per head count), quality (% defects in final products), safety (number of safety incidents per time interval). So, for a member on diet doctor site, an example of set of macro categories would look something like: food (amount consumed per time interval), fitness (state of physical health per time interval), serenity (state of mental health), conformance (ability to stay on plan).
The way macro metrics work in companies is that they use the concept of lagging and leading indicators. A lagging indicator is the macro view of the category, while leading indicators give the day-to-day tracking which needs to be tracked frequently to see if you will meet the macro goals. So it will look something like:
FOOD
Number hours fasted today
Number of meals today (eating more than one hour apart is a separate meal)
Number grams carbohydrates today, or N/A if full day fasting
Percent fat in food today, or N/A if full day fasting
FITNESS
Waist circumference today
Energy level today (provide Likert scale for member to score)
Pain level today (provide Likert scale)
Number minutes light exercise today, like walking, biking, etc.
Number minutes hard exercise today, like tennis, weight lifting, etc.
Weight this week (measure weight only one day per week)
SERENITY
Number hours slept today
Happiness-Sadness level today (provide Likert scale)
Stress level today (provide Likert scale)
Hunger level today(provide Likert scale)
CONFORMANCE
Number of incidences of non-conformance to eating LCHF today
Number of incidences of non-conformance to fasting regimen today
Number of incidences of non-conformance to light exercise today
Number of incidences of non-conformance to heavy exercise today
Number of incidences of non-conformance to going to sleep on time today
The secret to good tracking is keeping the most important leading indicators, and that's it. You have to be brutal and chop out any metrics that can be redundant, or less important. Also, the secret to good tracking is called "balanced scorecard" perspective. The best companies in the world follow this, and this is why they have become powerful. So, from a diet doctor perspective, don't just track food and weight...it's probably necessary to track health and mental fitness, for a "balanced" approach.
Note that number of calories is nowhere on the list provided...useless data.
Anyways, that's my two cents...
It's because every and I mean every tracking app on the market relies on the BMI and they grade food based off of the failed recommended food guidelines.
So currently if you log your meals and eat LCHF despite how much weight you lose and how healthy you become the tracking app will constantly send you terrible advice. On the one I used it graded the food.
Guess what 75-80℅ of what I was eating graded "C" or "D" because it's full cream or red meat or its full fat and on the days I naturally fasted or forgot to log my meals the app would suggest I eat fruit or grains or my favorite suggestion low fat yogurt (who's side is this tracking app on?)! Even though you know your LCHF plan is working it grates on your nerves to see your meals graded poorly and to get suggestions that are contrary to what works.
Most Keto eaters use the current apps as a means to an end. We want to capture the data and share the results with our doctors or fellow keto friends.
I personally would prefer a tracking app that was Keto structured so if I was getting too much protein I'd get an alert or if my daily natural fats were low it would suggest things like eating avocado.
Someday, someday.....
I also wonder about your working with a company that already has a large database of information, and a platform, but that you customize for this program. They all have some good features, but drawbacks.
Sparkpeople does something I love, which would be my ideal here (except that they're still calorie/BMI-based). You can log food in sparkpeople, but upload recipes in sparkrecipes. When you go to sparkrecipes and select a recipe, you can have it automatically add the item to your food tracker. It also creates shopping lists, and they can pre-load meal plans (but again, the wrong type of meal plans).
Tracking food, having recommended meal plans, the ability to search recipes or create and upload your own, and have the system create your shopping list. All amazing tools - if only they were "made for" LCHF, instead of having to create a work-around.
I see this as far more important in the early stages, as we're learning the ropes here, but still a good tool over time. I suppose, with the right approvals, it could also provide your team with some great research data, particularly over a large population and over a long period of time.
I have mixed feelings about the tracker. One of the most sustainable facets of this way of eating is that you don't HAVE to track anything. Tracking=DIET to me. I might be able to lose weight faster if I did this tracking of micro-nutrients, but I am losing weight slowly, but steadily without a lot of fuss and muss, and have reaped so many other benefits that I want to eat this way forever. I don't want to turn it into just another diet.
I am OK with a forum as long as it remains civil and supporting.
Have just been reading up on things people would like to see and I have a couple of suggestions.
I have been using a website that is called sparkpeople.com and it costs nothing to join. ITS FREE!
IMHO it has one of the best food trackers and fitness trackers on the internet and provides all the vitals for tracking calories, carbs, fat, etc. I suggest you recommend this site for the food tracker and fitness tracker for it covers everything you could think of for tracking. Most of all its user friendly. My second suggestion for the forum question is again go to sparkpeople.com and click on the community tab on top just like the food tracker tab. Within the community they have 4 sections that could answer your forum questions and be incorporated into Dr. Diet Doctor very easy and provide members the feedback and interaction they are looking for. As for the food tracker and fitness tracker that is provided by sparkpeople.com it is very web intensive to design and feel DR. Diet Doctor concentrate on the informative videos, meal plans that can be tracked in sparkpeople.com or somewhere else and develop a community like the one in sparkpeople.com built around LCHF. Hope this provides some help. Love the site and cant wait for further improvements.
Regards,
Gil Matthews
Daytona Beach, Fl.
(1) for paid members only; not even the free trial members, but actual paid members who are serious about nutrition, and take this site seriously.
(2) forum rules
(3) forum moderators who enforce the forum rules, delete inappropriate posts, and so on. I think it is likely that there are plenty of members who would volunteer their time for this - no need for it to be a paid position, except maybe the "top mod", who keeps the volunteer mods organized.
(4) ability to remove forum privileges from a paid member who is making inappropriate posts. No need to boot them from the site - just mute them if they are abusing the forum.
Simone, I'm so sorry you aren't seeing success that you had hoped! I am going to link a couple of articles that I hope may help you troubleshoot.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/how-to-lose-weight
https://www.dietdoctor.com/top-tips-lose-weight-low-carb-women-40
For traveling professionals like myself, time is of the essence. If I could plan pull down the nutritional information of what I ate from my plan, this would be one less obstacle. Including movement into those metrics would make DD king.
I wish there was a Carb/Meal tracking App so that I didn’t have to pay for two memberships.
I currently use Carb Manager
https://www.carbmanager.com/
Robyn (current member)
The other tool I would have to enter each meal and have it figure out the macros, etc. End up spending way too much time tracking. Want fast and simple.
It doesn’t need to be overly complicated. But each member may want more items (fitness tracking, weight and body measurements, etc). I’ll take anything as long as I can easily add your recipes to the tracker with little effort.
Nicole, we have a DD+ members only Facebook group. We would love to have you join us! https://www.dietdoctor.com/member/facebook-group Thank you for your suggestion related to the app and tracker. We are working on this feature for our meal planner.