Why I Built Setpoint - Setpoint Blog

I’m building Setpoint for people who want nutrition guidance without turning food into a full-time job. The short version is that tracking helped me understand food, and then became something I couldn’t turn off. I want the benefits (awareness, momentum, better choices) without the obsession, false precision, and constant mental bookkeeping.

Content note: this post mentions eating disorder behaviors

How I got here

I’ve struggled with my nutrition and weight pretty much my whole life. I spent most of my childhood overweight, not paying much attention to what I ate, and not thinking too hard about my health. By college I’d had enough and decided I was going to lose weight. It started with the usual playbook: fewer “bad foods,” smaller portions, more rules. And it worked. At first. Then I started using one of the popular calorie tracking apps. For the first time I could see, clearly, how my habits added up. Tracking didn’t just help me eat less, it helped me understand what I was doing. That part genuinely helped. The problem is I didn’t stop at “helpful.” I was obsessive to the point tracking stopped being a tool and started being a compulsion. Instead of tracking, I began treating my food as an exercise in minimization. It turned into a full-blown eating disorder. From the outside, everything looked great. I got smaller. People treated me better. People who met me later didn’t even know I was ever larger in the first place. On the inside, I was constantly hungry and constantly thinking about food. I remember sitting on benches and feeling my tailbone ache.

If any of this resonates with you, you’re not alone.

Eventually I burned out, stopped paying attention, and started gaining weight again, this time with the added bonus of an ingrained eating-disorder mindset. Then a friend asked me to join him in the weight room. Lifting was transformative for me. I was moving, getting stronger, building muscle, and my confidence was higher than it had been in years. And then I did what a lot of us do when something starts working: I started optimizing. I learned about macros and performance. I tried to hit my targets exactly. I weighed things. I measured every macro to the gram, all day every day. I worried if i was 6 grams under target. And here’s the frustrating part: if you’re consistent, that kind of precision can “work.” You can change your body by paying close attention. But the feeling of precision is just that: a feeling.

Why “precision” breaks

Once you’ve told yourself that the number is the truth, it’s hard not to treat it like a moral score. The problem is the number isn’t the truth. Nutrition labels are estimates, and the regulations explicitly allow meaningful variance between the label and what’s in the package (1, 2, 3, 4). Portions are messy too, and when you’re estimating or self-reporting, portion misestimation is one of the biggest error sources (5, 6). And then there’s biology: energy needs and energy absorption vary across people and across days (7, 8, 9).

Put all of that together and it’s simply not possible to track intake with gram-level accuracy in a way that matches reality. Chasing perfect numbers has a way of pulling attention toward the lowest-value details: did I hit the exact target, did I miss it by a little, is 96% “good enough.” And once you’re doing that, the mental load adds up fast: tracking, planning, grocery shopping, and constantly keeping a running total in your head. Every day. All day.

The wake-up call

Life eventually got in the way: personal stress, work-life balance, the normal chaos of being a human. Years later I found myself bigger than I wanted to be again, and my annual labs started showing signs of concern: blood pressure, cholesterol, lipids. I needed to take my health seriously. But I was also scared that “getting serious” would mean slipping back into obsessive control: constantly thinking about what I couldn’t eat, and constantly fearing I’d lose willpower.

GLP-1s helped the cravings, not the cognitive load

In late 2025 I started tirzepatide, a GLP-1 agonist (10). I expected to be less hungry and lose some weight, because that’s what the trials show for many people. (11, 12)

What I didn’t expect was the shift in my brain. I wasn’t obsessing over every bite. I wasn’t thinking about dinner while eating lunch. “Food noise” was gone. That helped with the cravings. It didn’t solve the second problem: the cognitive load. I still wanted a way to keep an eye on the things that matter for how I feel - in my case, protein and fiber. I couldn’t find an app that made this easy without pulling me back toward over-tracking. Even journaling sometimes turned into mental math. That’s the gap I’m trying to close.

What Setpoint is (and isn’t)

There are two big problems I’ve always faced when trying to be healthy:

The cravings and constant hunger.
The mental load of tracking, planning, and analyzing what I’m eating.

GLP-1s helped me with the first problem. I’m building Setpoint to solve the second.

One of the pillars of data analysis is signal-to-noise ratio. In nutrition tracking, a lot of what we treat as “high signal” is mostly noise: infinite-precision macro tracking, tracking everything by default, weighing every day, and then acting like the resulting numbers are ground truth.

Setpoint is my attempt to build a tool that treats uncertainty as real and focuses attention on the few things that reliably matter, without asking you to think about food constantly. That implies a few constraints.

First, Setpoint defaults to a small set of high-signal targets (for me that’s protein and fiber), because tracking everything is usually where things start to go off the rails. Second, it prefers ranges and trends over perfect daily numbers, because the inputs are noisy anyway. And third, the common path has to be low-friction: quick logging, a quick “am I roughly on track,” and a quick “what’s the next best thing to eat.” Just as important: it should avoid mechanics that push obsessive behavior. No streaks. No “you failed today” vibes. No turning eating into a game you can lose.

In practice, Setpoint should learn your goals, restrictions, and preferences; tell you whether you’re roughly on track for the targets you care about; suggest the next best meal for you; help you plan a week that fits your life; and generate a grocery list that matches that plan. That’s the app I wanted. So I’m building it.

One boundary: this isn’t medical advice, and if tracking isn’t safe for you, it’s worth prioritizing professional support over any app.

Sources

1 FDA 21 CFR §101.9 (nutrition label rules)
2 FDA Food Labeling Guide
3 USDA/FSIS 9 CFR §317.309
4 NIST explainer on label accuracy
5 Systematic review on portion misestimation in self-report
6 Portion size estimation tools review
7 NEAT variability
8 Energy expenditure variability
9 Atwater factor mismatch example
10 Zepbound (tirzepatide) prescribing information
11 SURMOUNT-1 (NEJM 2022)
12 SURMOUNT-4 maintenance/withdrawal (JAMA 2024)