online calorie diaries, part III, FitDay

The Facts: FitDay online is free. I used FitDay for two weeks. I lost 0 pounds (not the site's fault!).

FitDay is another online food journal/calorie counter that is free, supported by advertising, but it also is itself an advertisement for the Windoze software. Like CalorieCountPlus, the ads on the site are for alternative and unhealthy diets, with the addition of pharmicutials. FitDay feels less cluttered by the ads than CalorieCountPlus

FitDay is slow, maybe a little bit faster than CalorieCountPlus. Much is made on the site about the "upgrade" to FitDay PC but no PC-only features or screenshots are given.

FitDay has fewer name-brand choices than MyFoodDiary or CalorieCountPlus but I've discovered that at this point in the game, that is OK. Lasagna is just not good for you -- the differences between Stoffer's and Michalina's is minor compared to the difference between lasagna and steak-and-salad dinner. There are some annoying holes however, such as no hot dog buns (MyFoodDiary and CalorieCounterPlus can find hot dog buns).

What FitDay has going for it is a solution to the units problem: On other sites you not only have to locate your food, you then have to scroll down through the foods to find units you would like to use. FitDay allows you to add the food, and only then gives you a list of units that is not only longer than most, but appropriate to the food. Eggs come in one egg, small, medium, large, jumbo, grams, ounces, cups, kilograms and pounds. Red pepper comes in slice/ring, grams, ounces, cups, small, medium and large. Even "Custom Foods" you enter come in servings, grams, kilograms, pounds and ounces (cups would be good here but I can see the difficulty).

The second thing FitDay could have going for it is the the one-click add. Foods you have added recently are available on a drop-down list called "Recent Foods". Choosing something from this list adds it to your food list for that day, in the last amount you used, automatically. This saves at least three steps over adding from the search engine. Unfortunately this list is not sorted by how often you choose a food, it is sorted alphabetically. Foods beyond the first 21 require a page reload, where they are listed by date. After nine days of using it I can only see my foods Alcoholic Beverages (Wine) through Tomatoes, raw. Clearly when the list has 21 foods Apples through Avocado, it will be completely useless.

FitDay has a merely adequate "Overview" page -- the page that gives you the daily feedback about how the diet is going -- are the your input calories lower than your output calories? The first graph should be "Average Daily Calorie Balance" but in fact you have to scroll down to find that. The "Nutrition Graph" is interesting but really completely useless for weight loss. None of the graphs or reports really hit the mark like MyFoodDiary's smiley bullets.

FitDay allows you to add "Custom Foods" (known as recipes on other sites) but you have to type in the nutrition information, a fact that sent me back to CalorieCountPlus to enter the recipe there to get that critical nutrician information. As I've said before, if a diet site makes it harder to enter food you have cooked, than food you ate out, that rather defeats the purpose, since cooking at home is key to losing weight.

FitDay has a mood tracker that lets you customize a smiley face -- happy and worried? Angry and clear of thought? This might be useful if the site could analyze how foods fed into mood, but here it's just a toy.

I don't use the "community" aspect of any of the sites, but if that's important to you, FitDay doesn't have one.

online calorie diaries, part II, Calorie Count Plus

During August I used About.com's free program, Calorie Count Plus.

The Facts: I used CalorieCountPlus for two weeks. I lost 7 pounds.

The really great thing about CalorieCountPlus is that entering recipes is a breeze! You just type in the ingredients list:

1/2 cup skim milk
2 eggs, beaten
1 watermelon

and hit enter and the nutritional value pops up. What could be easier? After seeing the nutritional value you have the choice of adding a single serving to your food log, or typing in the complete recipe (directions, cookbook, etc) and saving it for yourself and anyone else who would like to use it. There are more than 100 recipes already entered from Joy of Cooking, Moosewood and Betty Crocker. 66 from America's Test Kitchen, 9 from Madhur Jaffrey (Indian), 3 from The Vegetarian Epicure. And those aren't even diet books. Since the recipes are shared by everyone (your screen name gets credit for having contributed a recipe) you can build a yummier diet for everyone! There are some odd hitches -- when you go to My Recipes to retrieve something, you cannot change the portion size -- so if you carefully typed in Aunt Edna's favorite cake, and then eat only half a slice, too bad! Better eat a whole one. Unlike MyFoodDiary, CalorieCountPlus has spelling correction.

A large fraction of the foods in CalorieCountPlus have a grade from A to F. In addition to your calorie count, you get an overall food grade for the day. CalorieCountPlus has two not very well-designed meters which tell you how close you are to your calorie limit for the day (going over it does nothing graphically as far as I can tell) and how close you to your activity goal. Whereas MyFoodDiary treats food input and calorie output as part of the same calories meter, CalorieCountPlus treats them separately. Meeting both goals for the day is probably a healthier way to lose weight. One interesting aspect is that you can get the CalorieCountPlus toolbar for Firefox. This gives you the multipurpose food/recipes/activity search box, an "Eat Meter" and food grade for the day, along with how much weight you've lost so far. All of the online food diaries have plots of how much weight you have lost, but if you are someone who weighs themselves every day, you'll appreciate the one at CalorieCountPlus -- it has a trend line that smooths out little fluctuations to show you your true progress.

You can upload a picture into CalorieCountPlus -- probably they expect it to be a picture of yourself but it appears on your home page and I didn't need to see my face every day -- I know what I look like -- so I uploaded something inspiring -- an irreplaceable vintage dress that I got for $5 that I want to fit into again.

How CalorieCountPlus could be improved:

There are two big downsides to CalorieCountPlus -- the screen is cluttered, not just by ads but by poor layout -- I'm always scrolling to get to the important part. And the site is slow. There's a long delay between each submission.

CalorieCountPlus doesn't have a water meter -- I rather miss this feature which gave me an easy goal to shoot for.

Other than the weight loss chart, there are no other charts -- past calories eaten are only shown in table form and aggregate for the day -- you never know if you are always eating too much at breakfast for example.

Since CalorieCountPlus is paid for by ads, they don't have much control over what comes up -- and what comes up is in direct conflict with good diet practice -- "Lose 10 pounds in 10 days", "The Supermodel Diet" etc.

Some features sound like a good idea -- food suggestions for example which make suggestions for new foods depending on foods you normally eat -- however in my case it reccomended either foods even worse for me than what I was eating (whipping cream? really? grade of D-) or recomended brand name items, having a beer resulted in "Coors Blue Moon", more of a product placement. Some of the items were just dumb: Brussels Sprouts - Cooked, Boiled, Drained, Without Salt -- that's enough to send you screaming off your diet. Another feature "Determine Your Diet Profile" gives you a quiz to determine why you overeat. As I took the test it was obvious to me that I wasn't scoring strongly in any particular direction, nevertheless I got a stern warning that comfort eating was my downfall -- I guess you must fit into one box or another.

online calorie diaries, part I, MyFoodDiary

Yes, well, it's back to the old diet. Time to give up on the idea that chocolate is a major food group and start trying to get veggies into the lineup. I've had really good results in the past with online food diaries -- one enters the food, they tell you the calories and at the end of the day give you some idea if you are ahead or behind calorie-wise. I should note that each of these sites has discussion boards and "weight loss groups" -- I'm an Internet loner so I don't use these. But as long as I have to do it, why not try different food diaries? One a month? OK, July is MyFoodDiary.

The Facts:

I used MyFoodDiary for 5 (non-consecutive) months (I paid for it for a year) It is $9/month = $108 per year.

Strong points. MyFoodDiary has a lovely clean layout. If you've worked with a free food diary that makes it's income from advertising, you've experienced clutter. Stuff irrelevant (to your diet) pops up to grab your attention. MyFoodDiary is like the Google search page -- uncluttered, with the most important stuff front and center. You choose the foods by entering search terms and then choosing from the list that results. Make a mini-list of exercises, then choose from them to keep track of what you burned. Two clock-like counters focus on the big picture -- how many days in that last week did you exercise? How many days in the last month? -- reminding us dieters that it's not how we screwed up today, it's how we get back on the wagon.

The status page reports on the overall health of breakfast lunch and dinner (with snacks in between and dessert), shows you how many calories you have left (you get credit for exercise), has a water meter (have you drunk your 64 oz today?). One of the nice features is a text and smiley face feedback (not as irritating as it sounds). So you didn't make your calorie goal for today, but you got a smiley face for skipping dessert! Ate nothing but brownies! But they were high in vitamin A!

Weak points MyFoodDiary works best if you buy lots of name brand products, never cook, and eat out at chain restaurants. Of course that is the exact opposite of an effective diet strategy -- you should be shopping the outside of the supermarket -- dairy, produce, meats and cooking at home. Entering recipes is a pain -- you have to find each individual ingrediant on a list. If you know another person (like a spouse) who is using MyFoodDiary you can share recipes so that both of you don't have to enter them but there are no cookbooks included and every other user has to enter their recipes from scratch.

The quantity options are also awkward. You need to be able to enter almonds in 1 almond, cups of almonds and ounces of almonds. You need to be able to enter water in ounce, cups or milliliters. Scrambled eggs come only in large, fried eggs come only in medium.

If you are going to come back to MyFoodDiary several times a day, you may be annoyed that it boots you out to a "diary" page, rather than leaving you at the page for entering foods. If there is one thing that's a little annoying, it's that for a pretty expensive place, there's very little development going on. Over the last two year even the motivational pictures and quotes are the same.