I have been thinking about switching from Fitday to spark people for my food log. I am just sick of fitday's limited database and the fact that they assume fat has been added to most cooked foods. I was playing around with the spark people log to see if I liked their format. I entered some of the foods from my fitday log and I noticed that they came out to a different total on spark people. for example, I had 110g of boneless chicken breast for dinner. Fitday counts this as 180 calories where spark people counts it as 121 calories. That is a big difference if all foods are off like that. Who do you think is right for that calorie count? What is your experience with spark people? Do you recommend it? I already use to for finding recipes and calculating my own recipes. I really like that they have so many foods including foods added by other people. My concern is accuracy though. It's going to be a bit of work to transfer my customs foods over so I want to make sure its worth my time

so I logged everything I ate today from fitday to spark people. My Fitday total was 1306 and my spark people total was 1231..hum It seems like the chicken was the main problem. Not sure about it

I use myplate - there 112 grams (4oz) of boneless skinless chicken breast is 110 calories - so basically inline with sparkpeople.

Is the fitday one perhaps including skin?

not sure? it says "skin not eaten" but maybe they assume the fat from the skin was still on the chicken. I don't trust fitday as much anymore. They were a little high on my calories for cherries and carrots too compared to spark people. lately I have been doing custom foods for almost everything because I don't trust their calculations.

I use sparkpeople.com only

I think if it says "skin not eaten" it is assuming the skin was on when it was cooked so the chicken absorbed some of the fat from the skin. Hence the extra calories.

I like the simplicity of Fitday. Yesterday I was playing with Sparkpeople and I don't know if I just don't like change, but the sparkpeople page made me anxious- like it was too busy. I like the breakdown they do of each meal, but I am just unwilling to learn how to use it. Also, I didn't like that it suggested lower calories for me than Fitday does. Mentally, I just need to know I can eat more if I want to. SP would stress me out trying to stay as low as they say I should go.

Just go with the one you feel most comfortable using.

A good resource for calories and nutrients in food is the USDA Nutrient Database. It has lots of basic foods in it - foods that don't have labels on them such as fruits, vegetables, & meats. It also has some packaged and restaurant foods.

For example, entering just chicken gives you screens of items to choose from including:
Babyfoods
Over 100 basic chicken entries (example: Chicken, broilers or fryers, wing, meat and skin, cooked, roasted)
Campbell's soup ~50 entries
Soups - no brand name
Swanson & Healthy choice broth
chicken bologna
Louis Rich products
Oscar Mayer products
Burger King
"Fast Foods"
McDonalds
KFC
Popeyes
Wendy's
Taco Bell
Stouffers
and many more

The database is found at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

The amount of information you get about each item is two printed pages long.

thanks for the help

I am kind of struggling with that too. Spark people feels really busy compared to fitday but they do have a lot of foods in their database. Its kind of overwhelming to use it right now. I ended up heading right to fitday this morning. I guess old habits die hard LOL. Maybe I should keep what I have but check into foods that come up as questionable like the chicken I already have almost 100 custom foods/recipes logged on fitday!

I will check out your link webrover

I like myplate (http://www.livestrong.com/myplate/) - much bigger database than fitday and pretty clean and easy to use.

Thanks, I will look into that one too

edit to add: I looked at that site and it seems pretty complete. I didn't see an option to add custom foods though. I rely heavily on my own custom entries as I eat some weird foods that dont show up in a search. It looks like you have to provide proof for a custom food. It's kind of confusing

I don't know about the difference in calories since I don't use a variety of programs, but I've never had SparkPeople "lie" to me about the nutritional values of anything I could check up on myself, so I tend to trust what it tells me for the things I have to trust it for (such as chicken breast, or veggies). I love SparkPeople. It can take some a little while to get used to it but it's actually fairly simple and easy to use. If you don't like all the features, all you have to do is go to your own fitness and meal pages and enter your stuff, simple as that, but there are a lot of other good features on there!

I'm wondering if the difference is cooked weight vs raw weight?

Yeah, I've only put in a few custom foods and I included a photo fo the nutrition label. Seemed kinda a bit much if you ask me but it didn't take very long (hello camera phone!).

After three months, I switched from fitday to myplate because myplate had so many more foods in the database. I hadn't really entered a lot of custom foods though. I cook a lot -- I just tend to add the ingredients individually.

I agree about sparkpeople being to busy. It totally overwhelmed me! I lasted about a day there.

One think about fitday -- which I think was good -- is that for something like chicken breast there were so many options -- raw, cooked, cooked skin on, skin not eaten, with or without bone, yield after bone and skin removed, etc etc etc -- if you could figure out which one described what you had, it was really accurate. But sometimes I literally could not figure out what they meant. But I agree with above posters -- raw weight vs cooked weight causes quite a difference, and I believe cooking a skin-on breast and then removing the skin can yield a different calorie count than cooking a breast that is skinless to begin with. I don't think other databases go into such detail, so you could, in essence, be undercounting with other db's as opposed to overcounting with fitday.

Also, for veggies, I found if you look long enough, there was usually a "cooked without fat" option on fitday. Or, I weighed the raw veggies and just counted it that way if I was just steaming it without adding anything.

One thing about myplate -- I think it estimates way too many calories burned during exercise. It is higher than the machines at the gym, my HRM, fitday, any other source I can find. So I enter my fitness manually so I can enter the calories rather than relying on theirs.