For the analysis to come out right you must record all the meals the program is set for. For instance, if NUT is set for three meals, and you eat more than three, combine them into three; if you eat less than three, record some mimimal item such as an ounce of water for each missing meal. This allows you to take a break from recording altogether, as NUT will simply concatenate the meals as if they were consecutive and give you a good average in spite of the gaps, because most full days will be represented correctly.
When using NUT, a user is more likely to "reset" the analysis screen than not, because this freshly resets all of NUT's internal variables to more effectively match one's actual diet. This might seem odd to the user who thinks of nutrition software as a method to follow some pre-conceived standard, and who therefore wants that standard to be rigid. NUT is an experimentation tool which is designed to be set quickly to how one is actually eating, so one can hold that pattern long enough to see if it is satisfactory, change that pattern in a controlled way, and see the history of those changes. In other words, NUT doesn't tell you what to eat, you tell NUT what you are eating as you go through the possibilities to find what works best, and to learn the symptoms that occur with sub-optimal strategies. The question that NUT particularly can help answer is "When a nutrient level changes, is it significant?" It is learning the correlation between how well one feels and the numbers in NUT, whichever numbers they might be, that makes NUT useful. The only way to learn the secrets of nutrition is through personal experimentation because a large part of the theoretical ideas about nutrition (which you must become familiar with) will be found to be inconsequential or wrong for you personally.
If NUT is not set for the proper calorie number, it won't give any guidance whether you are consistently overeating or undereating, and the tendency will be to overeat because it makes the vitamin and mineral numbers look really good.
The least useful approach is to decide ahead of time how many calories you think you should be eating. How do you know? What's low-calorie for someone else may be starvation for you. You need to capture some data at the beginning to find out how many calories you are eating, and evaluate whether that corresponds to weight maintenance, or not. It is silly to assume at the beginning that the lowest possible calorie level is optimal--maybe a higher level of the right calories would actually increase your energy level, metabolism, and lean body mass and put you out ahead--you don't know until you experiment.
At the beginning, you can simply press "c" and "Enter" on the analysis screen at the end of each meal's data entry, and reset the calorie number to whatever you are consuming. After I had done that for years, I finally got around to making NUT just use the average calories, and that option is under "Personal Options," "Change Calorie Level."
After a couple of weeks, you can look at the daily graphs of calorie intake and see how much it varies from day to day. You now have some idea of the average, and the tendency will be to try to plan meals to have exactly the same amount of calories each day. Big mistake! The body seems to hate that and wants to manage calorie intake itself, and will rebel against these types of plans. My feeling is that although you can use NUT to force the calories down in order to lose weight, you will be struggling with weight all your life unless you actually figure out how your appetite works. Except when you are eating strangely on purpose as part of an experiment to figure out something about a nutritional effect, let your body plan the meals and just record what is going on. If the result is continuous overeating or undereating, the intellectual challenge is to figure out what is wrong, and then buy food accordingly. Is it too many carbs? Too much fat? Not enough fiber? Foods not nutritious enough? Breakfast too meager? Whatever it is, that is what you need to figure out through experimentation so that the foods you buy and present to your body enable it to judge how much it needs to maintain homeostasis.
God bless the Powers That Be, but their idea of eating a high-carb diet in an affluent society is about as goofy as it gets. Yes, high-carb diets work well in disadvantaged countries, because the tragic food shortages keep the people from overeating. But to expect "will power" to do the trick when you have food shoved at you from all sides? This is just basic endocrinology. Carbs cause higher insulin levels, and higher insulin levels cause greater hunger. And whether or not YOUR body works exactly this way, you need to figure out how to pick wisely from what is offered, and frequently that means restricting carbs, or fat, or low fiber foods, or whatever, because you can't just eat everything! And when you find the strategy that works for you, you can set it into NUT by simply pressing "m" on an analysis screen, and all the "macronutrient" numbers are transferred to the personal options. If you wish to lock them in place so that they will not be accidentally returned to default settings from the analysis screen, you can go to "Personal Options" and see where they are set, and re-enter the same number for each item, and they will be "locked." There is also an "n" option not shown in the prompts, which does almost the same thing: it sets percentages instead of gram amounts. Finally, there is an "o" reset which returns any unlocked options back to the default. Every time you do any sort of reset from the analysis screen including the "o" option, the program recomputes internal variables to better match your actual diet. Of course, you can set the options manually, but watch out for the dreaded "negative fat" which, if it persists after a reset, means you are asking for more calories from carbs and protein than the calorie setting allows.
From the main menu, "View Nutrients and Rank Foods," take number 7, "Rank Foods per Daily Recorded Meals." Look through every one of these Daily Value nutrients, to see what the main source of each nutrient is in your diet. You don't want to drop something that is important to your intake of vitamins, minerals, or essential fats, and if you do, you want to try to find a substitute.
There are three places to look. "Rank Foods per 100 grams" shows the most compact sources of the nutrient--that is, most nutrient for least amount of food. Unfortunately, it sometimes brings up odd things such as 100 grams of cloves, something you really can't eat. So you can look at "Rank Foods per 100 Calories" and find the bulkiest sources of the nutrient. Often though, 100 calories is many, many cups of some leaves or something, and you know you won't be able to eat that much, so you look at "Rank Foods per Serving." Usually this will show some reasonable amount of food that is rich in the nutrient you are looking for.
Ironically, you will usually find that the best diet has a lot of variety, with foods that are not particularly rich in any single nutrient, but in combination, complement each other to produce a very nutritious diet. NUT doesn't give any guidance on this, except perhaps by pointing out foods which offer no nutritional benefits and can be dropped. So get as much variety as you can, and only then worry about adding special foods that fill in the gaps where an important nutrient is not represented adequately.
When you learn how to get the numbers up with real food--not "fortified" cereals, not vitamin pills, not "energy" bars and beverages, not the processed concoctions available everywhere--but real food, I think you will be surprised how something so important has been relegated to a position of minor concern in society's priorities.
Comparing two periods is a snap with NUT. Suppose you ate low fat last year but low carb this year and you want to know what has changed. You go to "Record Meals" and type in the last meal of the low fat period, type a dot to analyze, and choose a number of meals that covers the low fat period. Type an "e" and everything is set to 100%. Now hit enter until you are out to the main menu and go to "Analyze Meals." Choose a number of meals to cover the recent low carb madness. Behold! higher numbers show nutrients you are getting more of, lower numbers nutrients you are getting less of. Press an "m", "n", or "o" to get the numbers back to normal.
Here's an idea that confuses everybody so that I get more email about it than any other subject. You eat three meals a day and your custom is to eat pretty evenly 1/3 of your daily calories each at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But one day, you really pig out and eat a whole day's calories at breakfast. When you analyze breakfast by itself, just one meal, the numbers say 300% and everyone writes to me to complain that it should say 100%. I reply with algebraic formulas to explain how it works and no one is convinced. But didn't you eat three times as much food?
Let me give a fictional example illustrating the advantage of long-term averaging. Your friend swears that flax oil increases his testosterone levels and makes him a bigger man. You are intrigued and because you run NUT, you look up flax oil in "View Foods" and see that flax oil has more of the fatty acid alpha-linolenic acid than anything else. Your intake of ALA has been miniscule, and you have not been concerned about it. But now you want to try it so you pour yourself a nice jigger of flax oil everyday and record it in NUT. You don't see any testosterone effects, but you feel pretty good on this regimen. After a couple of weeks though, you realize the flax oil is giving you heartburn and you stop taking it. A month later, your hair looks like Bozo the Clown's hair and you are sure it looked better while you were taking the flax oil. The problem is that you have no idea what the most effective dose of ALA might be. But wait! If you use NUT to analyze the whole period from miniscule intake to excessive intake and back to miniscule intake, then press "e" and "enter" to set the polyunsaturated fat values to the average, you have a useful starting point in that "100%" now represents an amount of ALA likely to be close to optimal. You then shorten the meal analysis period to one week and look at your current intake, which is only 30%. You go to "View Foods" and find out how much flax oil provides 70% of a day's worth of ALA. You are on your way to finding your personal optimum for this nutrient if there is one, because the average will always be midway between too much and too little.
My sweetie brought home some irresistible ice cream candy bars that were about three bites each and 250 calories. Of course they weren't in the USDA database. Did I, the author of NUT and its wonderful function which guesses the recipes of packaged foods, sit down and type in the nutrition statement and the list of ingredients which included the ice cream, the caramel, the candy crunchies, and the chocolate coating? Hell, no! I just looked at the nutrition statement and figured the percentage of calories from fat--a little over 50%--and spent a minute or so finding some ice cream thing in the database which had a similar percentage of fat, and then recorded 500 calories of it. Don't get hung up on trying to record the exact food unless it really matters. Food composition tables aren't that accurate anyway.
I want to point out another way to enter food quantities in NUT that is not explicitly shown in the prompts. You can enter the number of servings as a simple fraction with a forward slash. Let's say that food suggestions for a two-week analysis shows you are short 14% of the Daily Value for Pantothenic Acid, but you aren't all that hungry. You decide to use sunflower seeds which have 20% of the DV for Panthothenic Acid in a serving. You can record 14/20 servings instead of doing the arithmetic in your head. Neither the dividend nor the divisor of this fraction have to be integers.
If the previous idea makes sense to you, there are three special cases where NUT will do the entire computation automatically. The special cases are the planning of a single meal to have a specified amount of non-fiber carb, protein, or fat. The most useful case is when you have a basic meal planned and want to add the amount of potato or other carbs that would achieve the non-fiber carb optimum for the meal. In advance, it is necessary to have NUT set for the optimum, and this means setting the Personal Options for Fiber and Total Carb. Now, when I plan the actual meal, I record all the food including a serving of potato, and the potato might be food #8 on the menu. I can change the amount of potato to achieve the exact non-fiber carb optimum for the entire meal by typing "8 carb".
Problem: The fish oil you just bought doesn't match any of the fish oils in the USDA database. If you have used the 'Add a Labeled Food' function at least once, you should be able to see how the same function can be used as a nutrient editor, to make small changes in an existing food to match a new food. The only "ingredient" in the new food is the old food. When NUT asks for the nutrient information initially, just leave it all blank. Then, and it can be laborious, go through the second presentation of the nutrient screens carefully to see what needs to be changed. In the fish oil example, only a few fatty acids need to be altered and then perhaps the total polyunsaturated fat adjusted. If the oil has been concentrated, you can assume they got rid of some of the saturated and even monounsaturated fat. If you make mistakes, as I always do, be ready to blow away the window that is running NUT and start over if necessary, to avoid having to save a defective new food. And you may intentionally not want to save the new food if you use the function to construct a composite food, such as discovering how much milk and whipping cream equals half and half, for example. And if you ever want to delete a bad recipe or labeled food, delete the record from FOOD_DES.txt, erase food.db, restart NUT, and it's gone from everywhere, including any meals where it was recorded!
There may be an infinite number of ways to do this, and I have tried several in all the years I have fooled with the program. I have found more things that didn't matter in the slightest or didn't work at all than things that illuminated how to eat according to my body's requirements. Although it is a lot of fun to eat unlimited amounts of crazy things, it is also a lot of fun to feel how your mind and body work when you have approximated the optimum diet for yourself with the foods available to you.
When I personally started to use NUT, my own program, I was disturbed to find that I actually felt worse as a result. I did extensive experimentation to determine exactly what the problem was, and I found I was deficient in chromium and this deficiency had ruined my insulin sensitivity, so that carb intake provoked various symptoms. And then, after I had corrected this problem, I had protein too high.
Even though I originally suspected that chromium required supplementation, I got so many side-effects from sustained effective doses of chromium that I was stymied for a long period until I gradually started to understand that a two-step process was required.
The first step was to eat strictly low-carb at about 72 grams a day, getting each of my three meals as close to 24 grams as possible. Many symptoms of too much carbohydrate vanished with this regimen and I learned how to eat enjoyable low-carb meals. The downside was that I never felt my mood was satisfactory--I often felt unmotivated and uninspired, or else anxious--and exercise always felt like more effort than it should be. I was able to "adapt" to low-carb if I moved non-fiber carbs down to 40 grams per day where the mood problems vanished and I felt more energetic; however, it was clear to me that my fasting blood sugar was going too high--I had a stiff shoulder and the stiffness radiated into my arm suggesting a nascent neuropathy. It felt as if gluconeogenesis, the body's production of glucose mostly from amino acids, was in an unregulated, full-blast mode to give me the best mood and energy level so I could run around and find some "better" food. So, no matter how I tried to do low-carb--different carb levels, different fats, more or less protein--I could not find a way to make low-carb a tenable long-term solution. But in retrospect, I can see that low-carb corrected my high fasting insulin and allowed me to proceed.
The second step was the discovery that effective chromium supplementation could completely solve the mood problem. It was easy to find the mood optimum, because if the carbohydrate level was too high, chromium gave me a headache. The main stumbling block for me was that the amount of chromium is 10 times more than is usually recommended, and I hadn't realized that the timing of the dose is important: I need 400 mcg. of chromium picolinate before each meal to lower the glycemic index of the meal by increasing muscle glycogen synthesis. There is no substitute for chromium picolinate because none of the other forms I tried lower blood sugar after meals, although these other forms could lower fasting blood sugar and they also could supply an additional, beneficial mood effect, so that I use a non-picolinate, yeast-derived "GTF" chromium, at 300 mcg. after each meal.
As a result of chromium supplementation, I now felt my insulin sensitivity was acceptably normal in that I could eat a satisfying amount of carbohydrate at any meal with no ill-effect. This was quite a new and welcome effect, but it was unfortunately accompanied by the earlier feeling that my fasting blood sugar was going too high, since I was often conscious of a stiff neck and congestion in my eustacian tubes. These symptoms suggested to me that protein was too high, because if carbs had been too high I would tend to feel it after meals (sleepiness, reflux) rather than "fasting." So I went back to NUT, moved the protein down to 100 grams, and learned how to plan meals with less protein.
A prior set of experiments had shown me I want to get my carbs mostly from starches and milk, because fruit and sugar, with their high fructose content, definitely reduce my insulin sensitivity. Another factor that reduces my insulin sensitivity is too much of the saturated fatty acid Myristic Acid (14:0), which means I must avoid butterfat most of the time. Besides the insulin resistance, at a level above a gram or two a day of Myristic Acid, my elbow gets sore.
Once I had removed all the impediments to insulin sensitivity, I had a body that was ready to burn carbs, but how much did it want? At this point, protein was determined at 100 grams and although fat was not determined strictly, it was unpalatable to pour vast amounts of oil over everything so there was a practical limit of about 100 grams a day. I found the non-fiber carb optimum at 250 grams per day, spread out evenly through my three meals. Less than that made me feel as if I were starving myself; more than that and my mood deteriorated and I did not feel particularly well.
I also used NUT to achieve the Daily Value from food for all essential vitamins and minerals, and then experimented with supplementation of individual vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. I determined that I need to supplement Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin C, as well as ensure an adequate intake of Omega-3 fatty acids.
It was a struggle to figure it all out, but now I am the world's reigning authority on my own nutritional requirements.