Using Automatic Portion Control (PCF)

Here is a meatless, gluten-free meal designed to show off NUT's automatic portion control. At 2600 calories for three meals a day, it nicely provides one third of the "Daily Value" for all nutrients except Selenium and Zinc. I've used the straight DV of 10% protein, 30% fat and the balance of calories from carbohydrate, but if you were to change NUT's options for your own personal optimums, all the food quantities would of course be different and perhaps some of the foods would no longer be usable, such as when a low-carb plan disallows very much carbohydrate.

Here is a brief discussion of what portion control was selected and why:

• Protein: A baked potato is not usually considered a protein food, but the cheese, which is definitely a protein food, is going to be used for its calcium instead. And, believe it or not, white potatoes have very high quality protein, although not as much of it as a piece of meat. Nevertheless, in order for NUT to correctly determine the total calories of a meal in setting portion sizes, it is necessary to always have a protein, a carb, and a fat food selected if you want automatic portion control for calories. (An exception: you can leave "Protein" turned off if your protein option is set to "adjust to my meals" and you can leave either "Non-Fiber Carb" or "Total Fat" turned off when the corresponding option is set to "adjust to my meals" just so long as the calories option is not set to "adjust to my meals".) However, you can pick and choose portion control selections when total calories are not a concern.
• Non-Fiber Carb: Dates work as a good carb choice.
• Total Fat: Butter is our choice here for a fat food. We could have used the fish oil, or the chocolate, but automatic portion control is best on foods we can weigh easily. The chocolate is a little chunk and the fish oil is in capsules, so their weights are predetermined and they make a poor choice as automatic portion control candidates.
• Thiamin: Now we start the optional parts of automatic portion control. These selections have a different purpose than the Protein/Carb/Fat selections, because we really don't care if we exceed the Daily Value for vitamins and minerals. We are selecting these options only if we have found by experience that we rarely receive the Daily Value in our normal food choices and we want to make sure we get some of these nutrients regularly to avoid a large cumulative deficiency. In this particular case, tomatoes have some Thiamin although potatoes have more, but we want to use the potatoes for other portion control nutrients and so we use the tomatoes for Thiamin.
• Pantothenic Acid: Sweet potato is a good source of Pantothenic Acid. If we picked a food that did not have Pantothenic Acid, we would get an "info" pop-up informing us of the fact. However, NUT can be bamboozled by complicated combinations of foods and portion control options that simply can't be reconciled. Don't worry about it, just try to understand why the combinations don't work together, and perhaps simplify the menu until you get a combination that works well. If a food ever goes to some extremely high or negative quantity, you can always click on it so it opens up in "View Foods" so you can take a different serving unit and quickly bring the quantity to something reasonable and then put the food back into the meal.
• Vitamin E: Almonds are a good source of Vitamin E. Why not just have a bunch of almonds at each meal and forget about portion control? Because many of the foods with Vitamin E have a lot of Omega-6 which we don't want. So we are limiting Vitamin E to the Daily Value to minimize Omega-6.
• Calcium: Cheese is an excellent source of calcium.

Now, what you can't see in the previous example is the playing with the menu to get the best compromise between your eating plan and what you really want to eat. Here is a "primal blueprint" style menu with many of the same foods that fulfills all the vitamin and mineral DVs, and which has less than half the carbs of the previous plan, almost no starch, a little more protein, and the balance of calories from fat:

In this example there are four kinds of meat: the salmon, the pork, the liver, and the beef. Besides protein, the salmon has Omega-3 and Selenium, the pork has Thiamin, the liver has Pantothenic Acid (as well as Retinol and a whole lot more), and the beef has Zinc. This suggests four different meals where you delete the three meats you won't be eating and use just "Protein", "Non-Fiber Carb", and "Total Fat" to enforce the macronutrient ratios on each individual meal. Over an extended analysis period, every nutrient would be covered by these four basic default meals as they are alternated and varied as desired. Here is the default beef meal:

Finally, here is a well-formulated ketogenic meal created with NUTsqlite. In this example, there is no portion control for non-fiber carb, which is set to "adjust to my meals", because carbs are controlled instead by choosing only very low-carb foods:

Here is the analysis for the preceding meal:

If a food goes to a negative quantity, it is a sign that the portion control constraints are already met elsewhere, and since you can't eat negative food, you will have to reorganize the menu. If you are totally mystified how to proceed, start with some meat, sugar, and butter as the PCF foods and slowly add what you really want to eat and watch the meat, sugar, and butter decrease in quantity as they are replaced with your own food choices.

Once we have designed a meal we can use, we copy it as a customary meal so we can reuse the meal when we are going to plan a similar meal. The reason you would be doing all this is because you want to eat in a particular way in order to discover if it makes you feel better or makes some symptom go away.

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