On-Line Diet Trackers

I've used FitDay but it's a huge pain. Calorie King is $45/year - not too bad but their main selling point is they list over 200 fast food things - I don't eat fast food.

Does anybody use an on-line tracker & do you like it?

There's bunches of them, some free some not. I tried one and while hate is too strong a word, I did not like it. It was so un-useful and unmemorable I don't even remember which one it was. It wasn't convenient, so I found a little program that runs on my Palm. It works better for me because it's on hand when I'm near temptation (I can check out just HOW badly it would put my diet off for the day) and can enter stuff as I consume, else I'll forget and then what good is it?

Admittedly, I haven't even been using that recently and have gained more than a couple pounds as I've indulged in stress- and depression-eating habits. :(

I had a membership at CalorieKing, and it is a nice site. You won't find as many people who are doing as much exercise as many of the TE members, though. I use the CalorieKing desktop software -- I think it was $40. Only problem then is that you can't log your food from every computer because it's not Internet based.

Balance Log is pretty good - and I think it runs on a PDA as well.

I use a log at a fitness site I belong to, but it's expensive and not really just about the food log.

When I'm not using that one, I like the PC version of FitDay. It's much faster than the website and it's customizable. I believe it's around $20 for the CD-ROM with the software on it.

I've also used sparkpeople though I admit to not having visited that site since early spring. I believe that it's still free and it works pretty well. Its a really nice site full of good ideas about building a healthy lifestyle.

http://www.sparkpeople.com

I use the internet version of Calorie King. I'm often at different computers but I'm almost always online, so the internet version works well for me.

While I don't eat any appreciable quantity of fast food, I find the restaurant items in the database to be very helpful because it makes it very easy to find analogous food items. For example, I don't patronize $tarbucks but I can find all of the common coffee drinks in the food database to use when estimating the calories in the latte I bought from the local roaster.

Also, tons of packaged store-bought food items are in there. Things like Mission tortillas, Paul Newman pasta sauces, Aidells sausages, you get the idea. If you're the type of person who makes 95% of their meals from raw/scratch ingredients and you never buy anything in a package, the restaurant/fast food data will be useless. For food that I cook, I create and save a custom meal with all of the ingredients in the recipe and then I have that for future reference.

It's also got a pretty handy custom meals feature. A custom meal is a combination of food items (e.g. I have one for Chips & Salsa) or you can input your own custom foods by entering the data from the nutrition label.

At the recommedation of others here at TE in another thread, I just started using www.sparkpeople.com. The online food tracker is free and so far I like it. However I find myself going to calorieking.com frequently to look up the information for things that aren't in the sparkpeople database (like the kind of cereal I eat, the kind of bread, etc) since I usually log this stuff when I'm at work and away from the food labels on the packages at home. But once you enter it at sparkpeople you can save it, so then if you eat the same stuff a lot (which I do for breakfast and lunch) its fast to re-select it for that day. There's also a lot of helpful articles on nutrition. Warning-they send you a ton of e-mail so I'm glad I signed up with my "crap" e-mail account so it doesn't bother me at work.

I like the idea of having something for the palm, I find it hard to come into work Monday morning and remember what I ate from Friday night through the weekend . . . I could log in at home, but that dial up connection is too much for my very limited patience.

For my 20 lb weight loss this year, I used Fitday for several months, then ponied up for Calorie King in April, because Fitday really didn't help me factor in the calories I was burning in exercise. As a result I'd have calorie-deficit days, which resulted in low energy and halted weight loss.

I don't eat a lot of packaged foods either, but I do use Cooking Light recipes quite often, and it's not too hard to enter in the nutritional data for such "custom" foods.

Thanks for the replies. I like the idea of the PDA counter. I imagine it can be downloaded into a computer, right?

I like Cooking Light also. Another cookbook that I use is South Beach Diet Quick & Easy. All meals under 30 minutes -- that is if you can find the oregano, etc. :D Maybe it's under 30 minutes for organized cooks who don't have to stop to put the laundry into the dryer, answer dumb questions from DH, answer the phone, etc.

I am Weight Watcher's gal, when I signed up for their monthly pass, I get free access to their website tracker. I've thought about stopping that & joining Calorie King, though.....

Anyway, I spent a few hours at B&N this weekend & bought a cookbook called "Low Fat & Light 4 Ingredient Cookbook", seriously every recipe was only 4 ingredients, I've tried 3 from so far & they have all been exceptionally good. They list the nutritional facts about all the recipes.