So - I would like to manage my weight better, and, just like with exercise, I know I need to find what works for me. (I do Bikram “hot” yoga 2 - 3 times / week).
Anyway, an online tracker could make a lot of sense - it gives me control, it makes various calculations and targets easy to quantify and measure against - stuff like that. Given my nature, it feels like it could be my kinda tool.
I have heard about www.fitday.com - but to really check it out, I have to register. I like that it is free and am tempted, but don’t want to register unless/until I commit to this type of approach - and decide that a particular website is the one I want to try.
So -
Do you use an online diet/food tracker? What do you like/dislike about the basic approach?
Which websites do you recommend? Why? How are they different? Is there a place to go to compare the various websites you might point me to?
Have you noticed increases in spam or other unauthorized use of your email address or other information? I avoid sharing much stuff on line and the thought of my food journal online kinda squicks me out, although I can really see the potential value of an online tracker…
Any other insights or tips?
Thanks!
ETA: Oh - and I am traveling over the next few days; I will be able to read posts via BBerry but replying may be more problematic (all thumbs on a BB, I am…). So if I don’t get back to a question or comment quickly, I appreciate your patience…
I use fitday.com. The site is very simple and easy to use, there’s no clutter or flashy crap. And all the useful features are free. The food database can be a little lacking, but it’s easy to enter your own custom products by typing in the relevant info from the nutrition label, if there is one, or coming up with an estimate. The reports generate pretty graphs which show things like calorie use/intake, weight goal progress, etc.
I’ve heard SparkPeople is also pretty good, but I haven’t used it.
There is no spam or evil marketing emails from Fitday. Your food journal is not public.
Livestrong has the biggest database I can find, with all sorts of modifiers (like “no mayo”, “no sour cream”, etc). Also, it has the best iPhone app available.
I do find tracking to be helpful for me. It’s the old engineering adage: “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. Of course, the measurement has to be correct! I always know that whatever I key in will be just estimates, and hence give myself at least 10% to 20% room of error.
Using a tracker helps me to plan my meals. I usually key in what I have eaten after the meal, once I get back to the office. Eventually after some time, you have a good estimate yourself of what you have eaten even without visiting the site. This helps me to know when I need to have a lighter dinner, or lay off the snacks.
I personally use LiveStrong, which does not required registration just to try it out (though if you wish to track, you need to register). I do not notice spams from them - it may be yahoo mail is being effective about it.
I liked Sparkpeople.com better than fitday. They seemed to have more food in the database, and I just found it more user-friendly. I actually think Sparkpeople is better than most of the pay sites for food tracking that I have used, too.
I never noticed any extra spam coming from Sparkpeople. They have a newsletter, but if you don’t want it they won’t send it. They offer meal plans, but you don’t have to use them, and while it automatically tracks calories, fat, carbs, and protein, you can add other nutrients to track, too.
I really really like Sparkpeople. Last time I used fitday, the food database was crap – I had to manually enter the nutrition info of very nearly everything I ate. It was a pain, and didn’t exactly encourage me to keep up with it.
Sparkpeople’s database is exhaustive. If it’s not in the “default” database, more than likely it’s in the user-entered database. I do find you need to double-check those entries to make sure the info is right, but that takes a fraction of the time of entering everything in yourself.
Sparkpeople also has fitness maps, now, which I love – I can plot and save running routes on a map, and it tells me the mileage and calculates calories burned from there. Much better than trying to guess how long my route is, especially since I mainly use running paths instead of roads (which makes things like Google Maps not incredibly useful, since it doesn’t recognize any transit way that’s not accessible to cars).
I used SparkPeople when getting started losing weight. Once I was in a good pattern, I stopped because it was annoying.
It was helpful at first to give me a reality check on portion size and calorie counts in seemingly innocuous foods. So bagels, pasta and cheese as everyday foods were out. It also showed me how much I was snacking and just helped me get into better patterns.
But I could never do it in the long term because of what I eat. Today, for example, I’m having a bowl of homemade soup for lunch and vegetarian stew for dinner, and I tend to make new recipes like that every week. I could calculate how many calories are in each and divide them by five or six or however many servings I get out of each dish, but it would be immensely time consuming. I worry sometimes that too much calorie counting can encourage dependence on prepared foods, which doesn’t seem like a good long-term strategy to me. But as a reality check it was very useful.
I used LiveStrong for a few weeks at one point. It was as convenient as that sort of thing could really be, and it really drove me to be a little more aware of the calorie values of everything I was eating.
Nowadays I just keep track in my head because I have a pretty good idea of the calories on everything I regularly eat, but I’ll still go back to their database every now and then to look up an item. I haven’t had any issues with spam e-mail or anything else; overall it was a really positive experience that set me on a good path.
Sparkpeople actually has a tool to enter recipes & calculate the calories per serving; you can save them to a recipe box, and enter them into your tracker.
I use Livestrong/Daily Plate. I used to use Spark People but I found their interface clunky and tedious to use. I am too lazy to put in recipes so I just try to find something that looks close. I don’t cook too often or just simple things so it’s not too much of a problem, I think. I’m trying to track how much of my calories come from protein/carbs/fat as well as total number of calories. I eat way too many carbs and not enough protein. I didn’t realize how much sugar was in my yogurt, for example, until I started tracking it.
A warning about Livestrong, they seem to overestimate how many calories are burned during exercise. I track exercise just to have it there but I ignore it when it says I can have this many more calories that day.
In addition to what’s been mentioned here, I found that you can allow them to meal plan for you, then run through the week (took me about 25 mins) and substitute any food/meal that you don’t care for with something else that you do. I made it a point to choose the same 2-3 meals for breakfast, lunch and snacks each day so that I could buy larger portions at the grocery store vs. needing 2k ingredients per week to make my menu work.
Once I set up my weekly menu, they have a grocery list that you can print which groups together all of the foods that you need by category (i.e. Meats, Breads, Veggies, etc.) and you can even choose how many people you cook for and the grocery list adjusts the amounts automatically.
If you’re anything like me and just have a REALLY hard time figuring portions and meal-planning to keep your fats/carbs/proteins in range, this is an absolute DREAM.
I’ve been using dailyburn.com for about a week and it’s fantastic so far. It’s just really well designed and it works great so far. It’s set up to track your nutrition and your activity (i.e. exercise) and your bodily statistics - weight and body fat and waist size etc… Their free iphone app is really easy to use as well.
I admittedly have not looked at any other site but in my humble opinion with this sort of service it’s all about the quality of the site and whether it feels like it’s working for you or if it’s just frustrating your goal of tracking your nutrution. dailyburn, for me at least, is just incredibly easy to use.
I use fitday.com too. I mostly like it; it does some strange things, like changing the serving size on custom foods, that I neither understand nor like, but it does a good basic job of recording my daily calories, exercise, and weight progress. My husband used the LoseIt app on his iTouch and he loves it.
I have actually started taking daily vitamin E because of tracking my food on fitday, since it also gives you the nutritional make-up of the foods - I was really short on it every single day.
Since you asked for any other insights or tips:
I’ve never used an online food tracker, but I have kept track of my calories before. Any time I tried to record everything I ate and how many calories it had, I couldn’t keep it up for more than a few days. Then I tried meal plans, where I actually planned out exactly what I would eat beforehand. I was able to keep that up for four months.