I wrote a while back about how I use Tally to track my calories when I’m not ready to enter them into FoodNoms (for example, out at our beloved Bellview Winery). Weighing your food and tracking it with an application like FoodNoms can be a cumbersome process, but one which will help you lose weight if you stick with it. It’s also a great way to learn about how much you’re eating, as we’re all prone to magical thinking about food and drink. And at the very least, tracking carefully in controlled situations helps you estimate portions when you’re out and about.

We once had one of the owners/waitresses at a local restaurant tell us how one guy comes in with a micro scale and weighs his sushi. She was befuddled by this behavior, but I could totally understand it. How many grams in a slice of salmon sashimi? It’s hard to know without a frame of reference.

Anyway, I started using Tally to track my calories when I’m out, and while it’s not as accurate as weighing my food, it’s better than completely guessing. I have a Tally set called “Food Log“ and I refill it with the kinds of food I’m likely to eat and drink when I’m out. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good alternative to trying to log every bite of asiago and sip of wine in FoodNoms.

Most of my Tallies represent portions of favorite foods and drink in grams; in some cases, the entries increment by 1 gram, while others are in higher increments (wine, for example, in 100-gram increments).

Tally has great Shortcuts support, as does Drafts.

Normally, I have to manually reset my Food Log Tally set to zero when I need to use it; the entries from my last usage are still there. I learned that Tally has a reset Shortcut.

I realized at one point that I could export my Tallies to Drafts, which I realized was a good idea: rather than nuke a set I forgot to log, I could export the set and save it in Drafts for later logging to FoodNoms.

I got to thinking: can I automate the process of exporting my Tallies to Drafts? I peeked at Shortcuts and realized that yes, I could.

It’s a pretty simple workflow:
– get the contents of the Tally set “Food Log”
– create a draft in Drafts from the Tally set
– append the current date to the draft
– reset the Food Log Tally set

That was pretty easy to do, and then I thought, can I automate it so that every night, right before midnight, the Shortcut would run? Once again, the answer was yes.

I created a new Shortcut, called Run Reset Tally Set Nightly, which, at 11:59 9pm, fires the Tally to Drafts Shortcut.

The only thing left to do is to figure out how I can export the Tally set data to FoodNoms.

I don’t use Shortcuts much, but when it works, it’s great.

I have the list archived in Drafts each night, and it looks just like it does in Tally.