I used to think nutrition tracking was so you would eat less. A slightly miserable, overly precise way of making sure you didn't overdo it. Something for bodybuilders, pros, or people who somehow enjoy weighing every gram of food.
I don't think that anymore.
What I've realised, mainly through cycling, is that for a lot of people training seriously, the problem is not eating too much. It's eating too little, or eating the wrong things at the wrong times, or just being wildly inconsistent without properly realising it.
I built Velorific because I was quietly struggling with something I couldn't quite put my finger on for about two years.
I was training seriously, following a structured plan, tracking power and heart rate, doing everything right on the bike. But I was always a bit tired. Recovery was slower than it should have been. I couldn't string good weeks together consistently and I kept assuming I just needed more rest or was pushing too hard.
Turns out I was under-fuelling. Not dramatically, not obviously, just consistently eating a bit short of what my training actually needed, especially on hard days. When I finally started paying proper attention to nutrition the difference was bigger than I ever expected. FTP went from low 260s to high 290s over about two months. Lost 1.4kg while eating more than I ever had. Felt better, recovered faster, trained more consistently.
The frustrating part was that nothing out there made this easy. MyFitnessPal is brilliant but it is built to help you eat less, which was the wrong problem entirely for me. Everything more sophisticated felt like it was designed for athletes with a full support team, not someone fitting training around a job and a normal life.
So I built what I wanted to exist. Something that looks at what you actually did that day and tells you what to eat. No complexity, no guesswork, just the obvious thing done simply.
It started as a spreadsheet. Then a local server running on my laptop. Then something I thought might actually be worth sharing.
Genuinely hope it helps some of you the way it helped me. Would mean a lot to hear what you think.