Yes, Fitday. Of course when I tried to submit Laughing Cow Cheese Wedge I [I]really[I] meant I wanted 2 pages of 'cowpeas', and then of course another page on variations of 'Peas', then 4 pages of every cheese I can think of except Laughing Cow.
My loveaffair with Fitday may be coming to a close, almost everything I record in the past couple of days I have had to create a custom food listing, which is fine, but it involves a recipe calculator from yet another website or having the label right in front of me which I don't always.
I'm ok with doing necessary footwork, and I do like Fitday's other good points. BUT If I want to maintain this lifestyle foreva, I know myself well enough to know that this needs to be streamlined and a fairly quick process.
Do you know of a site with a daily log AND great bank of food items, possibly a recipe calculator that will divide servings and be easily transferred to my daily log (..,,that make sense?). I only have a week and half logged into fitday so now is the time to switch if I can. THANKS!
And ..... I may just be really easily irriated now, I am missing lunchtime.
Last edited by BigBlueStar; 01-15-2011 at 12:31 PM.
i use calorie counter...not always accurate, but very user friendly. They also have a recipe calculator. There is also a firefox plugin that allows you to put a food in the search bar. There is an "eat meter" that you fill up during the day. Neato. Just google "calorie count about".
You'll get tons of different suggestions, but I've been using the the Daily Plate (livestrong.com/myplate) for a long time, and it does what I need it to do. There are some things I don't love, but I do love that almos every food I've searched for is in their database. I also use the Livetrong iPhone app when I'm out, although I've had some bugs with it and it's not as user-friendly as the complete webpage.
It seems to me that all of the calorie trackers have pros and cons, and there's a bit of a learning curve with using all of them. Maybe try a couple of days at one, then another, and then choose which one was better for your purposes? That may be a little labor-intensive initially, but you'd end up with the best site for you.
Sounds like I will be giving DailyPlate a shot! THank you all.
I googled the info I needed and plugged it into custom foods when I returned to my normally patient self (after a very yummy lunch).
Daily Plate is great for packaged foods: they seem to have everything. The one thing Fitday has that I love, though, is that they do everything by weight. If you look up generic "chocolate cake" on Fitday, you can put "100 grams". On My Daily Plate, you can only put in "1 serving".
The thing about Fitday is that you have to go at it backwards. For instance, for cheese curds, I had to put in mozzarella, then one of the drop-down options was cheese curds. For Laughing Cow, I'd probably look up processed swiss cheese, lowfat, and use that. They don't necessarily have brand names.
That's one reason I switched to Daily Plate. It does brand names. I can't think of anything I haven't been able to find in the database (maybe chestnut flour... ). The problem is that if you put in something more generic, like "chicken broth", there are SOOOOoo many options that it's really hard to narrow down which one applies to you. So I often just choose the option that is the most calories, figuring I'd rather overestimate than underestimate.
I just put everything in as custom foods. I expected it to be uphill because I am in the UK and everything is basd on US brands and names and habits . I don't think I could produce a single person who has ever eaten pumpkin, for example, and a good 70% will never have eaten peanut butter, so I knew I was going to need to build it myself. But once built I have really enjoyed working with it (desktop version) as it does all the things I need to do. Once I get to maintenance I need to feel I am concentrating on something other than calories or I suspect it will quickly vanish from my life, but I like the nutrition reports in so much detail so I've stuck with it.
I also prefer using custom foods anyway, I've used 4 brands of cottage cheese and calories per 100g vary from 74 to 108, and I usually eat the whole pot so that's just too much variation.
Daily Plate is great for packaged foods: they seem to have everything. The one thing Fitday has that I love, though, is that they do everything by weight. If you look up generic "chocolate cake" on Fitday, you can put "100 grams". On My Daily Plate, you can only put in "1 serving".
On Daily Plate, you can change the drop down under "How Much" to something besides serving. For example, if I enter 1% milk, I can enter "1" and change the drop down to "oz" for "1 oz", and it will calculate it for you.
Bargoo - I realize that the package has the information. I however did not bring the entire package with me to work, just the wedge. I googled the information and found it. That wasn't entirely my point of frustration with fitday, but thanks.
RoseRodent - good point, I too have built up a small list of custom foods that I have been using - which is nice because if you buy something frequently you can always just go back to your custom list. Its building that resource that I am finding/did this morning find to be obnoxious. And I also like that there are usually several diff. options for portion sizes on fitday.
Last edited by BigBlueStar; 01-15-2011 at 05:21 PM.
Really, Fitday?!?!! Really?
