Excaloricate
When Anton's father had a stroke, Anton moved him into the spare room and became his full-time caregiver almost overnight. He was 46, working from home between hospital appointments, and the last thing on his mind was his own weight. A year later he was 9 kg lighter — not because he chased it, but because he finally noticed where the food was going.
The year the days stopped having edges
Caregiving days don't have a clean shape. Anton's ran from the 6 a.m. medication round to the last check before bed, with physiotherapy, doctor calls, and meals stacked in between. He ate standing at the counter, finished whatever his dad left on the plate, and rewarded the hard evenings with biscuits and a glass of something.
None of it felt like much. That was the problem.
"I wasn't overeating at any one moment," he said later. "I was overeating in pieces, all day long, and none of the pieces looked like a meal."
By spring his belt had moved two notches and he was tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. He didn't have the energy for a diet, a plan, or another thing to manage. What he had was about ten spare seconds at a time.
Logging in the gaps
Anton started using Excaloricate because it fit into ten seconds. He didn't weigh anything or look anything up — he typed what he ate, or snapped a photo, and got an estimate. He could do it while the kettle boiled.
The first few days were just data. Then the pattern showed up:
- The plate-clearing. Finishing his father's leftovers added 300–400 calories most days — a second small meal he'd never counted.
- The caregiver's tea breaks. Two or three biscuits with every cup, four or five cups a day. It added up to more than his lunch.
- The hard-day takeout. Not often, but big — and always on the days he was too drained to decide.
He wasn't shocked by any single number. He was shocked by the total.
Small swaps, not a smaller life
Anton didn't have room for a strict regime, so he changed the cheapest things first. He stopped clearing his dad's plate and scraped leftovers into a container for the next day instead. He kept the tea ritual — it was one of the few calm moments he had — but moved to two biscuits and a piece of fruit. On the heavy days, he batch-cooked a couple of simple meals on Sunday so "too tired to decide" no longer meant a large takeout.
"I didn't want a new lifestyle. I had no space for one. I just wanted to stop adding calories I couldn't even remember eating."
The logging did the quiet work. Seeing the day add up in real time made the plate-clearing obvious, and obvious things are easy to drop. Nothing about his caregiving changed. The food just stopped being invisible.
What stuck
A year in, Anton was 9 kg down and, by his own account, steadier through the long days — less of the late-afternoon crash that used to send him to the biscuit tin. His father's recovery was its own slow story. But the part Anton controlled, he'd quietly got a handle on, ten seconds at a time, in the gaps between everything else.