My Food Diary

I really enjoy learning about food, nutrition and health. I do love sweets and diet cokes and cheese and red wine and more sweets... but I try to balance indulgent days and Emeril's Chocolate Molten Cake with exercise and balanced meals. Derrick and are like kitchen scientists with our ground flax, fiber powder, protein powder, fake eggs, oat bran, and fish oil. And as healthy as I "know" how to be and as routine as most of our habits have become, I'm bad about mindless eating or boredom eating or procrastination eating or overeating. For example, if I'm going to have dessert at dinner, I don't think ahead and turn down the cookie (or 2) I'm offered at work....

SO my solution was to return to a service I used when I worked at Make-A-Wish: My Food Diary. Myfooddiary.com is a service that allows you to enter your meals and snacks, your exercise, your weight and measurements and it will track everything you can think of and more.

For me, it really is like a fun game. At the end of every day, you get smiley or frowny faces to tell you about your day. Like Kindergarten, but it still works. It's simple math but I would never calculate these things on my own. I've learned how easy it is for me to get too much sodium and too much saturated fat, especially on those lower-carb days. I know the percentage I've had by noon versus how much I should have.

The best part is the "if you did this every day" section. For example, Super Bowl Sunday my report said that "if you ate this way every day... you would gain 11 pounds in 3 months". Ouch! It's really just a great accountability tool and I'm learning a lot about thinking about my entire day. The only downside is that it's $9/month but really you could give up the two or three Starbuck's drinks, and there you go. It's very easy for folks like me that are at a computer 50% of the day, but after about a week, the entering process is very quick anyway.

It's just easy. Visit the site and take a tour. It may be the healthiest tool I've found, and I plan on keeping it up. And although I'm not too obsessive about the numbers (I just want my favorite jeans to stay zipped) I have lost a solid 3 pounds since I started a couple of weeks ago.

I should be a spokesperson for this thing. And while I'm at it, here is a free Fitness magazine subscription I found this week. I found it on a trustworthy site, and so far I haven't been spammed with junk so sign up if you're interested.