Tuesday, June 9, 2009

My Calorie Counter

Found a neat website this evening, http://my-calorie-counter.everydayhealth.com.  It ..."provides you with the tools and information you need to succeed. Whether your goal is to lose weight, gain weight, make a few friends or simply track your diet and exercise". It is free with premium memberships with coaching available.

This website also works on my Windows Mobile device, so I can carry it with me wherever I go.

One of the features I like is that it allows you to build custom food entries. I had a turkey sandwich for lunch today. There are LOTS of turkey sandwiches in the database, but none quite like mine, so I made a custom entry. Using the labels on the food packaging I came up with this:


Calorie Counter
TurkeyBreadPickleCheeseTurkey Sandwich
Calories 80150570305
Total Fat g 420511
Saturated Fat g 10034
Trans Fat g00000
Cholesterol mg 25002045
Sodium mg 6902703902701620
Total Carbohydrate g 1261230
Dietary Fiber g 03003
Sugars g 05117
Protein g 870419
Vitamin A % 00044
Vitamin C % 00000
Calcium % 0802533
Iron %4100014

As you can see, it counts more than calories, it counts everything required on the food labels. I actually set this up in a simple spreadsheet to do the math for me; then I just entered the final totals so the entry looks like this:


Now, whenever i eat my custom turkey sandwich I can just enter it into my journal as one serving of turkey sandwich.

The database includes lots of restaurant foods, including some of my faves like the McD's Double Cheeseburger (458 calories!!) and the BK Sausage Croisan'wich (530 calories!!!) However, I STILL can't find anybody that lists the Papa Murphy's stuffed crust meat pizza.

Anywho, it costs nothing to setup a user account, after which you can log in from any PC and keep track of your diet. It allows you to set goals and provides reports to help you visualize your progress. FDA Daily Reference Values are included. The site also includes a suite of tools including BMI and BMR calculators, Meal Plan wizards, and Activity/Exercise lists. They also provide MySpace and Xanga codes and a Firefox Plugin.

I did a similar setup for my Peanut Butter Sandwich, so now todays Journal entry looks like this:


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