Hi, my name is Stacey and I am planning to switch from an Atkins type diet to calorie counting with healthy foods. I just can't eat another piece of bacon! I calorie counted with Prism several years back and did very well, then I had my last 2 kids and it all was over. I tried Atkins and lost a little on that a few years back, and just tried it again the last 2 weeks, but I can't do it. My youngest child is 9 now, so I really want to get back to the weight I was after Prism. I used to count all the calories on a note pad back then, but I am thinking of trying one of the online services. Does anyone use one? What one do you like? I don't mind paying for it if it is worth it. I would love any suggestions. Thank you.
I use myfooddiary and I love it. My favorite part is the fridge, where you put all your favorite foods to make them easier to enter every day. It's a little pricey, but I tell myself that it's SO much cheaper than weight watchers!
I was an avid fitday for years user until they loaded the site with ads. I switched to the daily plate but they were bought by livestrong and now they suck. I tried spark people but it was confusing to me and I could never find the foods I needed. I'm sort of still using tdp on ls but it pisses me off that it's so messed up.
Here's my experience with the online calorie counters:
Weightwatchers Momentum - $16.95 per month - Great system, though uses points, not calories. Lots of tools, recipes, etc.
Myfooddiary - $9.00 per month - Haven't tried it personally
Calorieking - $9.00 per month - Haven't tried it personally
Fitday - free - Not bad for basic tracking. Does not have a great deal of tools. Lots of ads.
Fitclick - free - Good tools. But may be confusing to use because it is constantly trying to send you to other sites where you can sign up for stuff. Overall confusing.
Sparkpeople - free - Not bad. Has a recipe builder tool, which I love, but the tool is not as user friendly as the weightwatchers recipe builder.
Fatsecret - free - Has a recipe builder, and it's better than sparkpeople's. Not easy as easy to use and find things as weightwatchers, but for the price it's pretty good. This is the one I use right now. I have been using it for a couple of months and so far so good.
Nutridiary - free - Some tools, not very user friendly, but ok for the price.
All of these have forums or communities, though I haven't used any of them much. I find that I get more support and information here on 3fc. In fact if they added a calorie counter here I would never have to go anywhere else.
I use Fitday and my husband uses LoseIt! I don't love Fitday, but it keeps track of my calories and weight in a fairly easy way. My husband loves LoseIt!, the iPhone/iTouch app.
I use the Daily Plate and am happy with it. I have seen complaints here of changes after being bought out by Livestrong but I guess I don't have those complaints because I started after the transfer.
I use sparkpeople, which is ok, not tried any other ones so I don't know what to compare it to. I used to have an excel spreadsheet that I got from some diet blogger, but I seem to have deleted it. On sparkpeople for the first few days I had to manually add the nutritional values of almost everything I eat, which was annoying, but as I eat the same foods very often it's getting less time consuming now.
I really liked thedailyplate.com (livestrong) but it would take forever to load on my home computer. Every time I clicked something I'd be sitting there for like 20-30 seconds waiting and it drove me NUTS. The food database is huge, and so is the activity/exercise database since livestrong acquired caloriesperhour.com.
I've been using sparkpeople.com now, which I like. It gets the job done, anyhow. They have an official curated database, which is fairly small, but you can also search a database of foods entered by other members, which is gigantic.
I used to be a member of calorieking.com back when it was $20 a year, and it was super, but now I don't think it's remotely worth it, considering all the free options available.
What online calorie counting service do you like?
