Monday, September 1, 2008

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.

No comments: