ABC News Rates “Calorie Counting” (aka Food Log) Sites
I hate the phrase “calorie counting” here, as I think it really discounts what these sites can do for you. I use The Daily Plate, and really find it useful. For years, I used FitDay, but found it to be clunky and lacking features like tracking what time of day you ate the foods and letting you create grouped items, like, say, the turkey sandwich you have for lunch four times a week, so that you don’t have to enter it item-by-item each time. FitDay is also sorely lacking on the search front- I had to enter a huge number of “custom items” like protein powders, Kashi cereals, All Bran crackers, specialty breads, etc., that were already entered into The Daily Plate.
I tried to use SparkPeople for a while as well, but found the whole site a little too pedestrian for me, so what little messing around with their food diaries was just cursory. I do remember them being a bit clunky as well.
If you don’t feel like you have a clear view of what you are actually consuming on a daily basis, I challenge you to log what you’re eating for a week. You might be surprised by what you find out!
The ABC Review of sites is located here.
Another nice free site for tracking foods is NutriMirror. It’s easy to use and the analysis features are really strong.
Two things that drives me crazy about calorie counting are 1. the nutrition information on the side of food doesn’t give the sum of the caloric value for the multiple servings. I want to buy a jar of tomato sauce and see the total number of calories for that one jar.
AND 2. like when you buy meat, the packaging for chicken will say 50 cal/3 oz but the package will be labeled 4.5 lbs. Yeah, sure I could get a calculator and do some math but I never learned my conversion tables! I know, I should just use food scales, but they also drive me bananas.
I have a small food scale that I keep in my silverware drawer. I whip it out every now and again just to be sure certain things (like CHEESE CUBES!) are the right size.
I’ll admit I rarely measure oils and such, I really should, though.
After I start with the nutritionist on the 8th, I definitely will do so!