Online help for New Year resolutions

January 2, 7:28 AMChicago Food ExaminerRebecca Wheeler

I’m posting from the Bahamas, where I’m on vacation and attempting to thaw out from Chicago’s blustery December. It’s pretty easy to feel inspired to create healthy resolutions here; the salt air and sun on your face make you feel like a new person in just a day or two. The trick of course, is keeping those resolutions. Like so many Americans, especially those who love food or are food professionals, I have struggled with my weight for years. New Year's resolutions for me usually involve eating healthier and committing to exercise…and then a few weeks later my efforts fizzle. Well this year I decided not to wait until January 1 and chose the totally inconvenient time to start over the holidays. It’s been challenging, but I’ve had a chance to test drive an online program that has been really helpful in my weight loss efforts, and ten pounds are gone that I hope to never see again.

 As someone who loves food I have always hated the word diet. Any time I try to cut out food groups, white stuff, etc., I set myself up for self-sabotage and wind up eating junk I hadn’t previously touched in months, before my so called diet. I can’t imagine a trip to Paris without a croissant, and the occasional Sunday without bacon. I really believe if Italians can get away with pasta, bread, wine and cheese, we should be able to as well.

With this in mind my efforts are really focused on portion control, eating mindfully, and listening to my body. Nothing is off limits, but it has to be really, really worth the calories and I have to truly want it, not just operate on auto-pilot. I knew I would have to write down what I am eating to build in some accountability and awareness. Just as I was getting started I came upon an great online tool, My Food Diary.com. The program is an online food journal that tracks calories and calculates how many you need each day to meet your weight loss goals. I’ve never been much of a calorie counter, and I can't say it’s loads of fun, but I will say it is very illuminating, and it’s made me much more aware and apt to make good choices.

I especially like that at the end of the day you get a report that breaks down how you did, even giving you smiley faces for areas you did well (fiber rich foods, exercise calories burned and so on) and frowns for areas you didn’t do so well (too much sodium, too many calories from alcohol). At any point in the day you can see how many calories you have left for the day, so I try to track what I’ve been eating throughout the day. The program can generate all kinds of reports, like average calorie intake over a week, and calories burned each week from exercise.

My Food Diary is easy to use and has a huge database of food to choose from. If, like me, you cook a lot (as opposed to eating frozen meals), you have to take a little extra time to enter the ingredients of a recipe in, but once you do it calculates the nutritional information for that recipe and saves it for quick access when you eat/track that meal again. Otherwise you look food up in the database or enter it manually.

The $9/month subscription fee is pretty easy to justify and easily offset by all the pastries I am not eating. If you’re looking for some support in keeping your New Year’s resolutions I think this is a great program. If you just want to eat healthier this year, my next post is all about Superfoods; foods that have the most nutritional bang for your buck.

Happy New Year to all!