i've spent a week and a half really religiously logging my food, drinks and activities.

its so easy to see now where i need to change and what little things i could tweak that could turn it all around!

more than HALF of my intake is carbohydrates. 3/4 of my fat intake is saturated fats! i go over my daily calories by 220 each day with my morning mountain dew! If i just start eating a mini bagel instead of a big one i could save 220 calories everyday!

goodness!

Isn't it great? I was eating so many carbs too! I added hardboiled eggs, string cheese and protein bars and my diet is more balanced.

I love fit day too. It is well worth the work to put foods into ( I don't think their amounts are very accurate ). I not only can keep track of fats and carbs. I also can see at a glance what I still need to eat to get those required amounts of the four basic food groups in a day. I have a snack every night. Fit day makes it easy to decide if I want to have this or that. I can choose the lower carb choice so I have plenty of carbs left for my snack at the end of the day.

Kate,

Carbs are not inherently bad. Up until this week my diet was pretty much 50% from carbs. Now, a lot of them were coming from fruits, veggies, and whole grain products. I really only changed this week to work on a lifting program which suggests higher protein levels. Finding a way to stay under the calories you've set for yourself may be the first step.

Having said all that, protein with most meals will probably help fight hunger pains and may limit a desire to overeat.

There is nothing wrong with carbs as long as they come from the right things. I tend to stay around 23 % fat 55% carbs and 22% protein, 1200 to 1400 calories. Most of my carbs come from fruits and veggies. Hard to get the 6 required bread/cereal groups in ( I am happy that I get 4 or 5 in everyday ) without adding a ton of carbs.

I love FitDay too. I'm not too worried about my carb/fat/protein ratios. I try to keep my fat intake around 30% (and definitely below 35%) and raise my protein as high as possible, but mostly I just try to keep below 1800 calories every day and get exercise two or three times a week. Just that little bit of effort is making a huge difference! And when I'm no longer teaching at a boarding school and regain some semblance of control over my own life, I have every intention of lowering my calories below 1600 and exercising more often. Honestly, I tend to average around 1650 calories per day anyhow!

I agree 100%!!! Fitday has truly changed the way I look at "dieting" and the food that goes in my mouth. I thought calorie counting was going to be hard, but it makes it SO EASY to plan for the day, evaluate what you're eating, etc etc etc.


LOVE IT. Can't imagine I would be doing as good as I'm doing without it.

same here!!

See, I signed up for fitday the other day but got completely frustrated because their numbers are inaccurate, it all depends on the brand of food and what not.

It seemed so AHHHH to sit there and put every food into it that I eat. But I guess if I put it in there as SOON as I eat it, then I will get a good build up of my regular foods.

Is it really worth the time, or should I stick to hand writing it? haha which I did for a week and then threw out the window.

Fitday taught me sooo much more than just the calorie counts of foods. Even if folks aren't counting calories, I highly recommend spending some time learning how to do this.

One thing I learned is this ..... a plain, natural, whole food is waaay easier to enter than a processed packaged concoction.

Try this ...
for lunch you can have either a tomato, a few raw carrots, a hard boiled egg and a whole wheat dinner roll --or-- a no-name blue label pasta primevera, a dish of butterscotch pudding and the latte your cafeteria makes.

Yes yes ... it was almost like God was tryin' to tell me something.

I've found that it's totally worth the time. I enter in foods as I eat them, so that instead of planning my menus ahead of time I just know how much I have left. But I'm also not terribly strict about my calorie intake - I try to vary it by a hundred or more calories on different days. I can't predict which days I'll be hungrier, so it lets me keep track of how careful I need to be on any given day!

As for inaccurate calorie counts, I haven't found that at all. If I'm eating a packaged food that they don't have a brand name for, I enter it in as a custom food. That means that I only eat packaged foods if I've looked carefully at the nutrition label, and if it's good enough to eat it multiple times (and therefore make it worth the effort of entering into the system!).

I find it very time-consuming. The two days that I used it it felt as if I were sitting behind the monitor all day.

Interesting... I guess for me the easy thing was I basically eat the SAME THING during the workdays... so that's quick and easy to fill out.

And I'm trying to eat less packaged foods--- so dinner is usually a chicken or meat, veggie, and maybe possibly something packaged...

If you're dieting by eating MOSTLY Things out of a box... then I can totally understand how it might be tough (but, then again, if you're eating out of a box you know EXACTLY what's going in yoru mouth and the label is right on it--- so counting calories manually would be just as easy)

I like fitday b/c a lot of the things I eat don't have labels on them--- whole foods, etc... so instead of paging through abook to find the calorie counts, I just click a couple buttons online.

The Custom Foods tab and the Recent Foods options are lifesavers for me. Onions, Tomatos, Lettuce, Chicken Breast, lean beef, potatoes, rice, broccoli, carrots... all repeated in my diet and easily accessible at a click or two....

Interesting how our opinions vary, huh?

It's all about the different lifestyles. I spend much of my time in front of the monitor anyway, writing up worksheets and entering grades and communicating with parents via email and wasting time while I'm on duty in the dorms, so I find it almost a form of entertainment to enter things into FitDay.

I've never stuck with entering it all in, but I think I'll start again.