Spark People

The online food diary that I am using is at sparkpeople.com.  I read about it in several fitness magazines....now I know why.  It is an extremely useful tool.  When you first log on the screens seem a little busy, and there is so much that is overwhelming.  However, if you will focus on the nutrition tab and just learn quickly how to log your calories, then the rest sorts itself out.  Last year I used another online food diary at everydayhealth.com and it was just more trouble than it was worth.

Here are my favorite things about sparkpeople.com:

• Once you put in your weight info and it calculates your BMR, the daily calories goal is a RANGE rather than one number. For instance my goal calories are between 1200-1600.  So I can shoot for the low number but not feel bad if I creep toward 1600.  For example, I only ate 1200 calories yesterday and I didn't feel deprived. However tomorrow night I may be starving, but I have that allowance to move up to 1600 without feeling guilty....because at 1600 calories a day, I will still lose one pound a week.
• the speed of the website is fast (so no waiting for windows to pop-up)
• it is easy to add your own favorite foods
• you can copy meals to other days easily (very useful, since most of us eat the same thing for breakfast/lunch everyday)
• You can make "food groupings" so you don't have to add every component of a complex meal everytime you eat it...for example (roast beef stew, taco salad, chicken/broccoli/cornbread).  This is so relevant, because as families we all have our standard meals.  Even more importantly, once you have measured out the portions for servings...you don't have to reread the contents of each package again.  You can just pull up the website and see that taco salad has 1/3 cup of ground beef, 1/3 cup of cheese, 12 Doritos, etc.  So, this is reinforcing your portion control behaviors. 
• There are really cool tools that help you track your nutrition easily...like pie charts to show you the percentages of fat/carbs/protien you are getting each day as compared to what you should be getting for your goal weight.

I am a Spark Person.