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
	Turkey	Bread	Pickle	Cheese	Turkey Sandwich
Calories	80	150	5	70	305
Total Fat g	4	2	0	5	11
Saturated Fat g	1	0	0	3	4
Trans Fat g	0	0	0	0	0
Cholesterol mg	25	0	0	20	45
Sodium mg	690	270	390	270	1620
Total Carbohydrate g	1	26	1	2	30
Dietary Fiber g	0	3	0	0	3
Sugars g	0	5	1	1	7
Protein g	8	7	0	4	19
Vitamin A %	0	0	0	4	4
Vitamin C %	0	0	0	0	0
Calcium %	0	8	0	25	33
Iron %	4	10	0	0	14

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: