Let’s just say my pants have been struggling to keep up with my width. I need to start looking at my diet.
So, I thought this would be a great time to utilize custom post types from within a WordPress theme. The goal would be to create a theme that tracks:
- Foods that I eat + calories contained in each food item (i.e. apple = 110 calories)
- Categories of food that I eat (i.e. sweets, breads, grains, dairy, etc.)
- Daily caloric intake (i.e. “1095 calories eaten today”)
- Qualitative feedback about whether or not I met my caloric goals (i.e. I burned 27 more calories than I took in today! That is good.)
I could create a custom post type called “Daily Calorie Tracker”. Each day, I would create a “Daily Calorie Tracker” post that would have:
- custom fields for “type of food” (i.e. apple) with a value of the calories in that type of food (i.e. “110”)
- custom fields for the category that each food item is in (i.e. fruit)
- daily caloric intake goal (i.e. 2000 calories)
Using PHP, I would then display the results of my day’s caloric intake on the front end of the website as well as suggestions for improvement.
Using Heavy Analytics, I would then track how I am doing against my goals. Am I doing good? Do I need improvement? etc.
That’s my idea for the night. What do you think? Any suggestions on how I can streamline this? Did I miss anything?
You just need an elastic waistband for your pants!
This would make a great plugin, I can see how it would be handy not just for diet and exercise, but possibly also for food bloggers.
Have you thought about using a custom taxonomy for food? Then you could create parent categories for food groups and sub-categories for different foods.
You could add the calories of each food item as the category description. This might allow you more ways to manage the data with WordPress or Heavy Analytics, querying how many calories you’ve eaten in a day or the number of vegetables in a month.
It’s be really cool to check out a category cloud with a few hundred posts and see if apples or potato chips is larger!
Oh! I LOVE that category cloud idea! It is rare to find a good implimentation of one, imho, but it might just fit the bill here.
Thanks for the ideas about custom taxonomies and categories. I need to think about this a bit more, because originally I was thinking that taxonomies would be a great solution, but then I changed my mind…
Another idea that just popped into my head: Awards! Example: “You ate healthy for 10 days in a row” badge.