Yeah, I love that grading... makes me feel like a kid studying for a test ! ;-) I am , in a great sense, LEARNING all over again , to feed myself nutritionally , so I'm excited about grades !

I'm doing it this way : In the morning I do most of the calculations about what I plan on eating in the day, and I think about dinner, and my exercise, and review the totals. I tweak from there, my plan for the day. Then, I am sure to write down on a separate food diary, everything I eat, without calorie calculations, for me to sit and imput later... when I have time to think about it. At the end of the day, I find I am (only 5 days into this) reviewing, studying and mostly happy with the deficit than discouraged (though there have already been a couple of really off-plan days, which I wasn't happy about the totals, but it was/is sobering, and that's the whole point... right? So that we Suck It In and learn to be accountable to the totals !

That's sorta like what I do. I have been calorie counting for so long that I can pretty much plan my whole day and be within my calories. So I usually get up, pack my lunch and snacks - eat breakfast then I get to work and enter everything in. I usually know what I am making for dinner a few days in advance, so in the mornings I just take out the meat or whatever it is I need. But I usually enter in all my food first thing - takes maybe 5 min, then I come to 3fc and post my plan. And usually I am pretty good to sticking to it. Today for example I never got to eat my yogurt and then this afternoon I had a starbucks frap, so when I get a chance I just log in and swap it. But after 4 years I pretty much know the calories of 90% of the things I eat on a daily basis.

Oh, I totally agree and everything is a learning curve. I just have a hard time when I can entire in a whole days worth of food in 5 minutes on sparkpeople - the less time the better! Entering customs foods and everything takes time I know, but I should be able to search a banana and add it in seconds.

They should have it more like fitday at least, so when the list of foods come up you can click an add button next to the food. Save yourself like 2 steps. That's why I was just wondering if there was somewhere in the site that made it faster; that maybe I was missing.

I should also add here that I am web designer and spend 10 hours a day working on websites and playing on the internet - so weird things about webpage usability bother me more then the average person.

You know, I started on Fitday more or less at random, and I can't imagine switching now, however logical it might be, because I've worked so dang hard on my "total weight loss" graph and I would never abandon it and restart somewhere else: when I am done I want one continuous record of my weight loss.

fitday must be the same, I've never done it... but... like... who cares? Same thing, different name. Definitely don't think you should change, I wouldn't !

I joined Calorie Count also. I picked that one because whenever I Googled foods to look up nutrition, caloriecount.com always had the most user friendly display of info. Also, I used the recipe analyzer several times. Now that I've joined (about a month ago), it has been an invaluable tool for me.

The only thing I don't like about Caloriecount is their forum. And this doesn't really change my opinion of the website, since I simply don't visit their forum anymore, lol. But every time I'd look through some threads, I found mostly normal people trying to live healthier lives, but there were a surprising amount of posts made like "I'm 5'9 and trying to get to 110, is 900 cal/day too much?" Stuff like that, and I saw a LOT of it on their forums.

But, like I said, it doesn't really affect my thoughts on the website as a whole since I come here for my forum needs, lol. It definitely provides an incredible resource, I'm amazed it's still free.

One of the big tricks to CC is the tagging system. After about a week using it, I went back and tagged everything that I ate repeatedly. If you have something you eat all the time (For me it's salad and homemade veggie soup) tag those together under something like "My Veggie Soup" and "Dinner Salad." On the tags page, you can click the + sign next to the tag and it adds everything under that tag.

Just make sure you enter in the correct portion size when you tag the item, otherwise your salad might come up as 400 calories because CC defaulted to a cup of croutons!

Like Megan, I don't use their forums at all. I have decided to use what is most abundant and easy... CalorieCount (and FitDay) are great for the calorie in & out w/ nutritional breakdown logs, and fun graphs, but there's no question that 3FC is where to come get almost-instant conversation and support, because it's so vastly populated !

Alecto ~ The tagging system is what makes CalorieCount so easy !