Hi all,
I'm new to the book and this forum, but so far it has been great. In week 3 of Stage 1 and my husband has even noticed I have less "wiggle in my walk!" Anyway, I searched for a way to track my meals and 40/30/30 intake online and found www.sparkpeople.com. It's easy to use and it's free. Plus after you put yourself into the system you can change your nutrition goals. It gives you a range of calories and grams per day. I took the information from page 67 in the book where I calculated my calories, carbs, fats, and proteins and entered those numbers on sparkpeople to reflect what I needed to eat on lifting days (the higher numbers) or on non-lifting days (the lower number.) And you can check your percentages of carbs, fats, and proteins at any given time for each day -- so that helps me make adjustments for meals/snacks as the day progresses.
Just thought I'd pass this along since it has been so helpful to me.
Happy training and great success to all!
I just looked at and signed up to Sparkpeople, so in case anyone's wondering about the differences, here's what I noticed. Fitday is more minimal in its web design; there's less obtrusive advertising, and for me it was more intuitively easy to figure out how to use it. It does a great job of analyzing nutrition, fitness activities, calories in/out, weight, etc. and there are simple tabs at the top to quickly navigate to your desired page. There is a pie chart on your food entry page for your macro ratios, that updates instantly whenever you add or delete a food. Simple to use.
Sparkpeople will offer you more "goodies" like exercise tips, networking with other fitness-minded people, newsletters, recipes, etc. I'ts very glitzy, flashy, lots of animated ads going all the time. I found it hard to use, a little cumbersome to add foods, the search box opens in a new window, and there are several steps to go through to find your pie chart of macroratios. And it doesn't like to give you your ratio breakdown until you have entered all the foods for the day. It breaks down your foods into specific meals, and you have to tell it which meal to add your food to every time you enter one.
If you are a magazine reader, Facebook-er, Myspace-er, etc. you will probably like Sparkpeople. If you are more minimalist, just want the basics with no extra glitz, and are less web-savvy, you will probably like Fitday. For me, Fitday won hands down. It's simple.
P.S. One feature I did like a lot on Sparkpeople is that it allows you to import a custom food from another member. So if you are tracking for you and your husband, for example, and you manually enter nutrition information for a custom food that you both eat, you can enter it once, and import it for the other person without having to reenter it. Fitday doesn't have that, so I have had to enter foods three times to track for three different people. Kind of a pain.
I suggest The Daily PLate (www.thedailyplate.com) I use it every single day and it is amazing. I tried fitday but I had to make lots of custom foods, and it was a pain really. TDP has lots of restaurant food, plus lots of brand name and generic foods, as well as recepies.
I guess it's what you're used to. I find Daily Plate to be also confusing and too busy a website for me. When I tried searching for "oatmeal" and chose Quaker Oats, which is the brand I eat, it wasn't clear if it was the old fashioned type, or what, and when I chose it it said something about it being maple and brown sugar which wasn't what I wanted.
I agree, I end up putting in a bunch of custom foods in Fitday, but if you have the nutrition label in front of you it's not a big deal. Then it's in there, and it's easy to choose it again later.
To each his own; the main thing is to find a way to track and do it consistently, right? There are enough different sites out there to please everyone. :-)
I tried fitday but I had to make lots of custom foods
that's the thing I like about fitday, I put almost all my own foods in.
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Vegetarian, consumer of large quantities of Quark cheese
Working my way from 76.4 to 58 kg (168 - 127.6 lbs)
Lifting a bit, schedule varies. Barbell weight: 22kg/48.4#
I like fitday as well. If there is nutritional info for something I eat, I'll take the time to enter it so I know it's exact. And since I eat quite a bit of the same stuff, it doesn't take that long to enter food for a whole day for me. I learned that if I eat healthy and decided on a small chocolate shake at the end of the day, that it WON'T ruin that days eating. lol... Of course I wouldn't eat one everyday, but once in awhile won't hurt me.
it's the greatest! It also has an iPhone app so you can record on the go (doesn't work for me -- I need to map it out the night before so there's no question of what I'm going to eat).
I use nutrimirror.com . I used to use fitday and caloriecount, but hated how I had to enter almost everything myself over and over again, and had to enter each food individually.
Nutrimirror's databases aren't terribly robust yet, BUT once you enter a food, it goes in the public database. You can also search by "recent food" and "frequent food," build your own recipes, and it gives you a nutritional breakdown for each meal as well as for the whole day. You can also add several foods at once without having to go back to your food log, which saves SO much time.
Nutrimirror also lets you custom-set your goals for % of carbs, protien, and fats and see them on your food log as your day progresses. That's been a great help to me!
The only cons I have are that it seems to underestimate my calorie goals. It is limited in letting you set a goal weight--and since I don't know what that would be for me with NROLFW, I tried to set it to my current weight--but it seems like the system doesn't know what to do with you if you're not trying to gain or lose a specific amount in a specific time. Also, it logs you out pretty quickly, so you have to log in over and over during the day, but that's a pretty small hassle.
I used fitday years ago, and still use it for my occasional weigh in to track my progress. I've found a site called fatsecret.com and i find it the best out of all of the sites I tried. The food database is enormous, I eat some odd foods and always find them there!
Website to track meals and nutrition
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