wisehawk.com

Online Diet & Fitness Journal

The first time I ever recorded what I ate was in 9th grade at Charles Wright Academy as an assignment for my biology class. I found the assignment only mildly interesting.

Later, around age 18/19, I counted my calories for a couple weeks just to see how my eating patterns were affecting me. It was a great eye-opener to see just how that 1 Coke a day affected my overall calorie count, and subsequently, my weight.

In 1996, I took a human nutrition class in college. In this class we used a computer program to record everything we ate. It had cool graphs to show how well we were meeting our nutrition requirements. My biggest complaint about the program was the limited amounts of food in the database and the inability to customize foods. Still, it was great fun to try to get my RDA of various nutirents by eating healthy. (Amazing how there is so little room left for empty calories when you are trying to meet your RDA on a 2000 calorie/day diet.)

Then around 2001-2002, as I started working out everyday at the office gym, I came across an online version of a diet & fitness journal on webmd. It worked a lot like the program I had used in college, but this one also had the exercise component, so I could see if I was burning more calories than I ate.

Last week I went back to webmd and found that they are now charging for access to their online diet & fitness journal. Bummer. I want to use it, but not bad enough to pay for it. So I did more searching. I found a great little online diet & fitness journal: www.fitday.com.

So far, I'll have to say I'm quite impressed with this free site. Although the reports aren't as wonderful as I would like, the food database is fantastic! This is the first database I have found that contains the funky foods I eat, like sprouted wheat bread, almond butter, and rice crackers. In addition, you can create customized foods, so the nutirition facts can be tweaked to match your food exactly as the package says.

The activity database is pretty impressive too. Although I can't find a stairmaster exercise that burns as many calories as the stairmaster in my gym says I'm burning, I just crank up the time spent to get the same result. The activity database even has activities such as "making bed" and "Fishing from river bank and walking." Pretty funny.

Overall, the site is not perfect, but it the food and activty database is sufficient for most users; the interface is pretty usable (I didn't read any instructions or 'take a tour,' but I figured it out pretty quickly on my own, which makes it pretty usable in my book); and the price is right: free.

If you are interesting in seeing how many calories you are consuming vs burning and how much of the US RDA you are getting in your diet, I would recommend you give FitDay a try. Let me know what you think.

Posted by heather at January 17, 2004 12:50 PM