Better Health & Living
Diet & Exercise Trackers
People who've dropped pounds and kept them off have found that one of the keys to success is keeping a daily journal
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There are dozens of Web-based, tracking programs that do everything from calculating how many calories you’ve burned to analyzing the nutrient content of every meal. Using them is almost like having a personal coach with you every step of the way. The Web sites listed below offer a variety of tools, information, and motivation for staying the course and reaching your weight and fitness goals. Some are free and others charge a monthly fee.
www.calorie-count.com Check out the free nutrition database and dieting portal. Other helpful features include specifics on restaurant menu items and a good food journal with a large database of foods. The site also offers an analysis of the carb, fat, and protein content of what you’re eating and provides nutrition labels found on packaged food items. It even assigns a letter grade to each food so you’ll know which is healthiest.
www.ediets.com This site provides its own diet and offers support for many popular weight-loss plans. Its free food diary and nutrition-tracking program is organized by food type (dairy, cereals, etc.) and has pull-down menus for individual items, although it doesn’t include brand-name foods. The program will analyze your daily entries in your food diary for calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbs, fiber, protein, and more than a dozen vitamins and minerals. You need to register at the site to access the free nutrition tracker. Other diet services, such as menu planning, specialized diet plans, and coaching, are available for a monthly charge of about $4.
www.fitday.com Members who complete the free registration can track their daily food intake, goals, weight loss, and exercise routine. The site provides reports and analysis of your daily nutrition, including percentage of calories from carbs, fats, and protein. You can set a goal weight and deadline, and Fitday provides graphs to chart your progress. Sign up for the free Web-based version or buy the more robust PC-based program that gives you bonus features to help with motivation, emotional eating, and identifying diet saboteurs. You can download the PC version to your home computer for $29.95.
www.fitwatch.com This site offers a wealth of diet and exercise support tools to registered members. The free version has a nutrition database, food and exercise journal, and goal-setting features that allow you to specify what percentage of your daily calories come from fat, protein, and carbs. The activity tracker will let you know how many calories you’re burning during dozens of activities, including exercise and even home repair. You can also get credit for calories you work off walking the dog (5 calories per minute), painting the outside of a house (8 calories per minute), and even sex (active, vigorous effort: 2 calories per minute). The free version of the site is supported by advertising, while the deluxe version has no ads and costs $4.95 a month. The latter allows you to see your vitamin and mineral intake by food group, monitor six body measurements, and do more detailed nutrition tracking such as types of fats consumed.
www.ivillage.com To use this site’s meal tracker, you need to type in the calories and nutrition values for each meal. For the activity tracker, you enter how many minutes you’ve exercised, and the program figures how many calories you’ve burned. Free registration is required to take advantage of the trackers, as well as the health calculators, to compute your body mass index (BMI) and your daily protein, fat, calcium, and iron requirements, based on your height, weight, activity level, and measurements.
www.smallstep.gov Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this site lets you set goals for physical activities and exercise, track your progress, and earn a certificate for achieving your goals. It’s also available in Spanish.
www.sparkpeople.com This free weight- and fitness- management site sports an extensive set of tools. The food-tracking database has 10,000 entries, including name-brand supermarket items and foods from many restaurant menus, so it helps take the guesswork out of correctly entering what you eat daily. The database also contains nutrition information and gives you daily reports on the amounts of fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and folate you’re getting. The fitness section contains photos and short videos of strength-training exercises. Its group support community is very active.
www.startyourdiet.com With free basic membership, you get a weight-loss goal planner and weight-tracking calendar. For $19.95 a year, the deluxe membership includes tools for planning and tracking meals and exercise, a food database of more than 10,000 items, and a scorekeeping tool for rating how well you do each day on the program. It also offers diet chat boards and a community for support.
www.weightwatchers.com For those officially doing the Weight Watchers Diet, signing up for the companion Etools online is a good investment. For $12.95 a month, you get a meal planner, a tracker for food, points, and exercise, and thousands of healthy recipes from their archives and from the active Weight Watchers community. The site can be used either in conjunction with Weight Watchers meetings or as a stand-alone, online weight-loss program. Using Etools is easier than tracking your points in a paper journal. When you sign up for it, you also get Weight Watchers On-the-Go tracking tools for your Palm OS or Windows OS handheld device. BHL
Eileen Buckholtz is an Internet consultant, a professor of E-business for the University of Phoenix Online, and author of more than a dozen computer books. She enjoys demystifying the Web for her readers.
Keys To Success
Using Online Diet & Exercise Trackers
- If you bite it, record it in your online tracker. Remember that snacks, tastes, and nibbles—and even licking the bowl—count, too. Don’t fudge!
- Weigh or measure food to determine portion size.
- Check that you’re getting the right nutrition to feel good each day. Empty calories and junk food won’t satisfy you.
- Set your browser’s start page for the tracker Web site you’re using. That way, it will come up every time you start your browser, and you’ll be reminded to enter your data.
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