I'll admit it without any trouble: I'm one of those people who logs almost everything they eat. For years I've used an app to record my meals, I keep an eye on the balance between the calories that go in and the ones I burn training, and I know by heart a lot of numbers that don't interest normal people. And yet I'm working on a product that, if we get it right, will make me stop doing it by hand. Let me explain why, because I think it says a lot about what Cookit is.
How I became someone who tracks everything
It didn't start from an obsession, it started from sport. When you train seriously for years, sooner or later you realize food is part of the training, and as someone who likes data I started measuring. Knowing what I ate and how it fit with what I burned gave me a sense of control, and at first also results.
For a while it worked. Tracking taught me a lot about how I actually eat, which is often different from how we think we eat. That awareness was useful, I won't deny it. The problem came later.
What tracking gave me and what it took away
Tracking gave me awareness and a method. It took away lightness. At a certain point I found myself mentally weighing everything, doing the math even when there was no need, turning a dinner with friends into a small accounting exercise. And cooking, which for me is a real pleasure, was at risk of becoming an operation to balance.
That's when I started asking myself whether it was worth it. The honest answer is that the data itself isn't the enemy. The enemy is the effort of managing it by hand, every day, and the way that effort gets into your head and takes the enjoyment out of things. Eating well shouldn't cost all that attention.
The problem isn't the data, it's doing it by hand
This is the distinction that unlocked it for me, and it's also the heart of Cookit. Having a sense of balance between what you eat and what you burn is useful, I haven't changed my mind on that. What makes no sense is that to have it you should do the work of an accountant, weighing, logging, calculating, every single day, on your own.
Manual tracking is an old tool for a real need. It forces you to choose between two extremes: either you count everything and lose your mind, or you give up and go by feel. In the middle, where most people's real life happens, there was nothing. That middle is where we wanted to build something.
What we want Cookit to do
The idea is simple to say and hard to do: keep the value of the data without dumping the effort on you. Cookit does include the balance side, because for certain goals it genuinely helps, but that's not its center and it doesn't ask you to become a bookkeeper of your food. The center is Ada, the guide that tells you what to cook and walks you through it, keeping balance in the background instead of under your nose.
In practice it's the tool I wish I'd had all these years: one that handles the numbers as much as they're needed, and leaves me the good part, which is cooking and eating without the worry. Not a calorie counter that hands you a log, but a guide that keeps the log for you.
Eating well without the accounting
The goal, for me, is to get to eating well without having to think of it as a task. To keep paying attention, yes, but without it becoming a cage. To close the tracking app I've used for years and rely on something that takes that work off my shoulders.
If Cookit does its job well, the day I stop counting by hand will also be the proof that it works. I'm building it first of all for someone like me, but with the aim that it serves most of all the people who don't want to become like me, and who just want to eat well without making it about numbers.
