Calorie Tracking: Which Sites and Why?

[Silly Sally]

I've noticed many different mentions of this; just curious who uses which site and why?

I used Spark in the past, but got tired of so many clicks to do one simple thing, it seemed. Or, am I just lazy as per usual?

[missjane]

HI! First post & nutrition site question

[Buttercup67k]

I used to use Fitday: FitDay - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal
But now I use Daily Plate: Calorie Counter, Diet Tracking, Food Journal, Nutrition Facts at The Daily Plate

I think think Daily Plate has a much larger database and it is a little more user friendly. It also tells you how many more calories you have left for the day and a few other bells and whistles that are pretty cool.

[karenmc6]

i also use the daily plate. i love being able to enter my own recipe and then choosing portions from it. say i'm making chili, i just chose all of the ingredients for the entire recipe - 16 oz can kidney beans, 1/2 onion, etc. then i can chose the new chili custom menu item that i just made and tell the program that i ate 1/8th of the recipe (or whatever).

other programs allow custom menu items, but most of them just let you enter the nutritional info (which i don't always know about my personal recipes). not a real problem if you eat out a lot or eat more packaged foods or single ingredient meals (like celery with peanut butter).

just my two cents! karen

[InterpreterJess]

I use the free online version of FitDay. I like the idea of the recipe calculator on sparkpeople/daily plate but I think it's kind of complicated since you have to pick that you ate (as used in prior example) "1/8" of the recipe, but you have to figure out how much 1/8 of the recipe is. Or maybe I did it wrong.

[Cynthia]

I use Calorie King desktop software. I have been using it for several years, it is very quick and easy to manage and includes more foods than any other database (so I've read). Btw I agree there is far too much clicking involved at SP (plus logging weight lifting on there was way too much work)...

[karenmc6]

Originally Posted by InterpreterJess

I like the idea of the recipe calculator on sparkpeople/daily plate but I think it's kind of complicated since you have to pick that you ate (as used in prior example) "1/8" of the recipe, but you have to figure out how much 1/8 of the recipe is. Or maybe I did it wrong.

in my example, 1/8th of the chili recipe might be one cup of chili. or you make a pie and have 1/6 which is a slice. you just enter 1/6 or 1/8 and the program does all of the math.

sometimes my recipes are just one serving - like my chef salad which almost always has the same ingredients. making a custom menu item makes it quick - you only enter one item. but maybe i didn't add cheese today, so i can just click to delete the cheese.

it's really very easy - much more complicated to explain! lol

karen

[Silly Sally]

Wow, thanks all! I knew there had to be a better way.

I will check out Daily Plate and Fit Day - AND take the time to read beautiful Jane's link - tomorrow. (Just got the computer back from the local geeks-R-us) and need to attend to some kid junk. Dang it.

[foodfromafar]

Be sure to check out SparkPeople, too! I love it!! Over the past year, I've input most of my favorites including my own recipes with their recipe calculator. It's almost effortless to track now... Pauline