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Online food diaries: Free sites that can help you achieve your fitness goals
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A food diary is a great tool to help you start focusing on your eating habits and is especially useful when you're trying to lose weight. In fact, research has shown that people who keep a food diary can lose up to twice as much weight as those who don't.
Keeping track of every single thing you eat may seem like a daunting task at first, but there are online tools that can help. A good online food diary can make it easier to duplicate meals or snacks you frequently eat, as well as keep track of nutrition information and calorie counts for you. This can be important because many people underestimate how many calories they consume during the day and tend to overestimate how many calories they burn doing exercise.
There are several free, online food diaries to choose from, and most do much more than just keep a food log. These applications also track your progress by allowing you to add physical activities, body measurements, and can show you reports and graphs based on the information you've entered. They're not simply food diaries, they're your personal fitness trackers.
Some things you may be interested in when deciding which service to use:
- Body measurements: Can you keep track of your weight, height, body fat %, physical dimensions (like waist, hips, chest, etc)?
- Foods database: Can you easily find your favorite foods? Are servings easy to add? For example, it might be easier to add turkey bacon to breakfast if you can add them as number of strips instead of number of grams.
- Exercise database: Does it have a wide variety of activities you can choose from? Does it let you add custom activities? Does it let you add sessions in minutes or do you have to use decimals (for fractions of hours)?
- Tools: Does it have a BMI calculator? Does it have other useful tools you might want to use?
- Notes/journal: Can you add comments to your entries? For example, maybe you were at a party or had limited food choices. You might want to jot down your mood at meal time or during your work out. All of these things will help you evaluate your current habits to see where you might want to make changes.
- Mobile: Is the service mobile -- can you use your phone to make updates?
- Social networking: Are you looking to interact with other like minded people for support and resources?
- Progress charts: Does the site offer graphs and reports that'll chart your progress? Visually seeing this information can help motivate you.
- Meal/exercise plans: Do you want a site that will help you set up meal and exercise plans?
- UI: Is the site easy to use and visually appealing? You're going to spend a lot of time there, especially when you first start using it.
There are currently two free sites that offer all of the above: SparkPeople and The Daily Plate. SparkPeople has a free mobile accessible website. The Daily Plate doesn't offer free mobile updates, but has an iPhone and a Blackberry app you can purchase, as well as a mobile website you can use if you upgrade to a paid membership.
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