Definitely agree that this is a useful tool.

TLDR - Food & Exercise choices affect wakefulness and neurological stamina & performance.

I'm not an expert by any means, but have done some research on it for various health reasons and would go deeper into it for those on HackerNews who tend to see food hacking as a pointless endeavor where the simplified modal of energy/wakefulness = calories.

When we think of bodily energy, we think of calories as fuel. Yet after certain meals such as Thanksgiving dinner, or a "heavy" lunch, fatigue tends to set in. If we refocus and consider energy consumption as feeding the cellular mitochondria and assisting cellular ATP transport from the mitochondria, then all of a sudden, it becomes obvious that calories as fuel is somewhat of an inadequate model for optimizing biological chemistry.

It's intuitively obvious that substances like caffiene, modafinil, amphetamine salts provide a neurological boost by affecting various neurotransmitters & neurons. The question then becomes what do I need to do to achieve the following: optimize neural stamina via neurotransmitters & bodily ATP generation & consumption?

* Increase ATP Stores/Mitochondrial Size (Available mechanical energy)

* Increase ATP Usage (Usage of said energy)

* Optimize availability of wakefulness enhancing neurotransmitters

In a nutshell, supporting the aforementioned biological chemistry becomes what is important. The trouble with ATP is that it's like the L1 cache of processor memory. There is a relatively small amount of ATP available for use, and when exercising, ATP is used up within several seconds and muscle glycogen is then converted into ATP. Muscle glycogen (stored away sugar) is kind of like a processors L2 & L3 Cache. The liver also stores some glycogen and is like main memory. Food & fatty acid breakdown is like a harddrive (if we are treating data retrieval like energy availability).

It becomes obvious that for optimizing energy (ATP) consumption supporting the citric-acid cycle is more important than pure glucose & fatty acid consumption. Most people have 15+% bodyfat. That's 15lbs of bodyfat per 100lbs of body weight. 5-6lbs of that is essential for hormone production and such, so that leaves around 10 lbs (35,000 calories) of potential energy available for a hypothetical 100lb person. Most of us reading this are probably somewhere around 130-200+ lbs @ ~20%. For the hypothetical 100 lb person with 15% body fat, burning 1800 cals per day, that's enough energy to last for about 20 days without eating and very little physical activity.

Of course it's recommended to not stop eating for people looking to diet via starvation as the eventual consumption of all potassium would lead to heart failure. But there is a story of an obese guy who starved for a year or so and survived on yeast & potassium supplements under medical supervision.

As far as increasing our ability to store away glycogen, glycogen is stored in muscles and in the liver. Increasing muscles increases our ability to store away glycogen. With weightlifting, the MAX & fastest rates general man can add around 1-2lbs of muscle per month and female can add .5-1 lb of muscle per month for about 1 year for an untrained body. Every year after that, the rates falls about half. A general male/female can add about 50/25 lbs of muscle in their lifetime. Yes, lifetime. For a male, Add 10-20lbs the first year. Add another 5-10 the next year. Add another 2-5 the year afterwards. It tends to be a good idea to maximize muscle production between the ages of 15-30 as the body is growing and generating human growth hormone to stimulate muscle growth. After 30-35, the body stops overproducing and it tends to be about maintenance and steady losses as the body cannibalizes muscle protein with age.

Now that L2/L3 is optimized with extra muscle & hopefully larger and more mitochondria per cell, it becomes important to optimize Main Memory (Liver) & Harddrive (fatty acid breakdown) optimization abilities. These all function on biological chemistry, thus the limiting chemical reagent is the most important factor to support. limiting-chemical-reagent meaning obtaining nutrient dense foods. Adding glucose to the diet without the ability to process said glucose is a recipe for fatigue. The citric acid cycle pretty much runs on having enough amino-acids (aka protein), oxygen, and supporting minerals & chemicals (magnesium, potassium, vitamins [ABCD...], etc). The simplest optimization of nutritional intake I've seen is with the Wahl's Protocol developed by Terry Wahls. She has a TED talk explaining her recovery/maintenance from Secondary Progress Multiple Sclerosis. (http://terrywahls.com/minding-your-mitochondria-dr-terry-wah...)