I would say that this 9 month period was important because it probably trained you to intuitively know how much to eat. I went through a similar process 5 years ago: I had to monitor my vitamin K intake so I grabbed the USDA nutritional database, wrote up a simple little web app for my own use (made public at cookingspace.com) and after using my little app for about 6 months, I had trained myself to intuitively know how much vitamin K I was consuming every day.