For the flight to Vancouver last week, my girlfriend bought me the latest copy of Mens Health magazine. There was a lot of good stuff in it, including a few nutrition articles. In addition to a lot of tips about good foods and what not to eat, there was a nice little diet plan. Given your level of exercise during the week and your desired weight, you can easily determine how many calories you should be eating in a day. For me, that’s about 2,600. But in addition to that, it breaks down how many grams of protein, fat and carbs I should be eating.

It’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing, but keeping track of what you’re actually doing can be difficult. At least, it was until I downloaded a new application for my iPhone called Tap ‘n Track that keeps track of everything. It has a lot of foods already pre-programmed, including popular restaurant meals, and it’s easy to quickly add in something that’s not already on there. It stores your recent meals, so if there’s something you eat all the time, it’s easy to add it. The main feature that I like is that it gives you a current daily summary of the basic nutrition information so you can quickly look at how much protein, fat and carbs you’ve had and figure out where you need to fill in the gaps. Yesterday I was a little light on protein late in the day, so I had a protein shake.

(Update: The newest version of Lose It is, I think, a better calorie-tracking app than Tap ‘n Track. The previous version didn’t allow you to track carbs/protein/fat but now you can. It allows you to create recipes — create a ham sandwich by adding components so that in the future you can just add that one item instead of having to add bread, ham and cheese — and it is a little more visually appealing than Tap ‘n Track. And it’s free.)

I’ve been blessed with a fast metabolism. I remember when I was in junior high poking my dad’s gut and making fun of it and he’d say, “When I was your age, I looked just like you,” implying that my gut was just a matter of time. Now I’m 34, the same age my dad was when I was poking him, and that gut still hasn’t shown up for me. I owe a lot of that to my genetics, because I never really had to think about what I eat. (Thanks, Mom!)

Then I got Tap ‘n Track. I never realized how many calories are in a lot of things I was eating, and I’m not even wasting calories on soda and candy bars like I used to. (I cut out soda about two years ago and cut way back on the alcohol. Now I drink water with almost every meal instead.) I used to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a bedtime snack, and a few little snacks in between. I was thinking that with all the exercise I was doing, I needed more calories — I’ve been trying to gain weight (muscle), not lose it. For the last two days, I’ve had to cut out the bedtime snack because I had already hit my calories for the day. That really woke me up. Now I eat smarter and I eat less, trying to stay at my 2,600 calories and make sure not to have too many carbs. I’m sure I annoy my girlfriend a little with all the calorie- and protein-tracking I’ve been doing for the last few days, but I’m just trying to get an idea of what I normally eat and what I should eat. Once all of that is internalized, I won’t need to track it any more. (I promise!)

If you had asked me a week ago how many calories I took in every day, I would have thought it was around 2,200-2,300. After tracking what I actually eat for the last few days, I realize I was probably taking in about 2,900-3,000.

A lot of states are considering making restaurants put some basic nutritional information on the menus — in some cases it’s calories, and in others it also includes grams of fat. Most fast food restaurants already have brochures you can look at, and a lot of restaurants have the information on their website, but studies have shown that a very tiny percentage of people look at the information in fast food restaurants. (Nobody knows how many people look at the information online.) The newer laws being proposed would make fast food restaurants put the information right up on the big board, and make sit-down restaurants put it right on the menu. If that information were there, you would find that the large french fries at Five Guys weighs in at over 1,400 calories — as much as 37 Oreo cookies. Armed with that knowledge, I think the vast majority of people would order the regular fries instead.

Naturally, fast food restaurants are fighting these laws. As much as I am against most regulation, I think this one would be good — especially considering the health problems caused by obesity. In my ideal scenario, you could eat whatever you want but you’d have to pay for the consequences of those actions. But if we’re going to have Medicare, Medicaid, and some other form of nationalized health care, then we all have a financial interest in obesity being less common – and right now the obesity problem in America is only getting worse. Making restaurants put the calories on the menu would result in people switching what they eat, and then restaurants would reduce their portion sizes to something more reasonable so they could get their calorie count down. The cost of dining out would fall, people would have more disposable income for other things, less food would be wasted, and we’d save money on health care. I think those are all desirable outcomes.

I’m a Libertarian and that means keeping government out of my business as much as possible. I don’t like Big Brother telling me what I can and cannot eat (banning trans-fats in New York, for example). But I am in favor of making restaurants give us this information clearly and visibly so that I can make smarter decisions for myself.

Update 7/27/09: An article from the Wall Street Journal indicates that 9.1% of medical spending is a result of obesity. With more information, it would be easier for people to make simple choices to help prevent this.