Example Goal: Eat 14 servings of vegetables per week
Unfortunately, there's not yet a magical app that will automatically track and verify your vegetable consumption (holler if you've made one!), so we've got to use a manual-entry goal to beemind this. Fortunately, that's a pretty straightforward setup!
First, you'll want to decide the metric you care about most. Do you want to get really specific with your food scale and beemind how many grams of vegetables you eat? Or maybe you're more relaxed and would rather just estimate servings without measuring precisely? Precision might sound nice in principle, but consider what's convenient in the long term as well!
Your choice of metric will dictate the type of goal you set up and how you enter your data, so try to pick a metric that'll be useful, but not too difficult to track -- whatever that means to you.
Manual-entry veggies goal setup
- Head to create a new goal (also accessible through the New Goal link in the top menu).
- Click the + icon to start a new manual entry goal.
- Select Do More as your goal type (because you want to Do More vegetable eating).
- Enter the units you want to use and the amount you want to commit to. In this example, I'm aiming to eat 14 servings per week, which is the same as a goal to eat 2 servings per day. Beeminder always works on a per-day basis, but don't worry: if you eat six servings of vegetables in a day (nom nom nom), then you'll be safe for three days (6/2=3) instead of just one! (If you don't want to gain safety buffer and you really just want a goal of 2/day, every single day, you can ratchet when you've done extra to stay on track.)
If you want to delay your goal's start a few days (maybe you're traveling this weekend), be sure to tick the Start this goal with extra leeway box. Enter the number of days you want to delay and press Continue.
- Give your goal a brief name. If you want, you can also write a short description with more information.
- Finally, choose your initial pledge. This is the amount you will pay the first time you derail on the goal. After derailing, the pledge will increase by default — use the dropdown below to control how high it goes by selecting the cap. In the example below, I have chosen to start at a $5 pledge, which will increase each time I derail, until it reaches $270 — the pledge cap. (To read more about pledges and payments, check out some FAQs!)
If you want to start out with a sort of trial period, you can choose to start the goal at $0. If you do that, the pledge will automatically increase to $5 after seven days. If you derail before that, it will also increase to $5.
- And now once I step through the confirmation and preview steps, my goal is ready to go! I'll need to get stepping in 4 days to avoid paying Beeminder my first $5!
Veggie goals in action!
You can explore a real user's healthy-eating goal below to see how your goal might look once it's been going for a while.
Keywords: eating more vegetables, example goals, example graphs, health goals, nutrition, diet