intofitness.net

Background:
Back in March 2008, I had been in a weight-loss plateau for three months, weighing in at 193 pounds and having a body fat percentage of 15%. Despite my intense exercise routine, I was not able to lose the desired remaining weight consistently; however, my body fat percentage was also decreasing slowly.  I suspected that I had been eating too many calories for weight loss, and was simply maintaining my weight.  I knew that if I wanted to go below 10% body fat, I could lose about 20 more pounds.

Results Summary:
I started using MyFoodDiary.com (MFD) on March 31, 2008 and reached my goal of 175 pounds and under 10% body fat on August 6, 2008.

What is it?:
MyFoodDiary.com is a web-based calorie counter and exercise log designed to be used as part of a weight management program.  Most users of this online service use it to assist with weight loss.  The site tracks calorie intake (diet) and calorie expenditure (exercise).  Then based on the user’s physical statistics and goals, it calculates how many calories must be consumed and/or burned to either lose one to two pounds per week, maintain weight, or gain weight.  Users can monitor on a daily basis two factors involved in weight management: food intake vs exercise.  MyFoodDiary.com supports the basic weight loss premise that one must consume less calories than the calories expended.  For example, in order to lose one pound per week, one should create a calorie deficit of 500 calories/day.  Over the course of seven days, the deficit would be 3,500 calories, which is approximately equal to one pound of weight loss.

You can watch a video overview here.

Target audience (Who is it for?):
MyFoodDiary.com is best suited for the disciplined person.  Ideal users are those who are willing to record what they eat on a daily basis (using the site’s online database of over 50,000 food items), record nutritional information for the foods not in the database, and record calories burned through activity and exercise. Users should be goal-oriented, motivated, determined, and persistent.  The service is best applied by those who want to change to a healthy, active lifestyle.  I would not recommend this service to people looking for a quick fix to their weight problems or those who just want to change their diet without exercise because losing weight in a healthy way is not just about food or “starving yourself”.  Additionally, I believe the service works best in conjunction with the use of a heart rate monitor during exercise to monitor the exact number of calories burned.

Overview of how it works:

1. Set goals.
2. Record food intake daily.
3. Record exercise activities daily.
4. Generate daily summary and/or reports on personal progress.
5. Adjust food intake and/or exercise activity levels to reach goals.

Recording daily food intake
The main tab, Food Diary, contains three ways to enter information about your food consumption plus a searchable, online food database of over 50,000 food items.  You can also search for foods that you have entered yourself.  

Food Diary >> The Fridge, Manual Food Entry, Recipe Builder

First, you search for your food item in the database. It’s fairly extensive, and a pretty powerful search engine in its own right. So you should just use a few key words when searching. For example, suppose you’re looking for Niblets Corn & Butter Sauce by Green Giant.  If you search for green giant, the result will return all the food items in the database containing Green Giant, which produces an unwieldy list of 25 items, four pages long.  But if you narrow the search to just the keyword niblets, the search result returns only two items.

Searchable food database

After the search, you can:

• Add the food item to your e-fridge
• Specify the quantity of the food
• Specify for which meal of the day you ate the food item

Manual Food Entry >> Add New Food

Finally, you can also add your own recipes to your own database and/or e-fridge with the built-in Recipe Builder. The recipe builder allows you to create custom meals and specify the meal by how many servings you consume.  It calculates how many calories the serving is worth based on caloric value of all the ingredients in the recipe.

Recipe Builder

Limitation: As with any database, there’s a finite amount of food in the database. Although cumbersome to manually enter nutritional information, your personal food database seems limitless. One suggestion to make things easier would be to incorporate a barcode scanner that would input the nutritional information directly into the database. Now that would be hard core.

After you enter the food, the Food Diary shows you a list of the food items you’ve eaten so far.  I really like the drop down menus that allow you to change the meal for which the food was eaten.  This allows you to correct mistakes from the summary list without having to re-enter the item.

Food Diary >> List of foods eaten for the day

Recording daily exercise
After you record your food items, use the Exercise Log to record the calories you burn through physical activity.  There are two ways to enter your activities: (1) Predetermined exercise list with estimated caloric values for a given amount of time and effort or (2) Manually enter exercise and calories with the use of a heart rate monitor.

Select from a predetermined list of exercises with estimated caloric values

Customized exercise list, manually input calories from HRM output

Power Recommendation: I highly suggest using OPTION 2: Manual Entry of Exercise. Get a good heart rate monitor like the Suunto t3c, and use it while you exercise. Then you can enter the exact caloric expenditure you have for your activity. This gives you more control over what you can eat and also lets you decide how much you want to exercise in order to burn a specific amount of calories. Although it’s a bit rigid, it allowed me to be in control of what I would eat because if I wanted to eat a little bit more, I could simply exercise more.

After all your exercise is recorded, you can see your list of physical activities for the day and the total amount of calories burned.

Exercise summary

Generating an overall summary or daily report
This is the most powerful feature of MFD. After you’ve finished entering your food eaten for the day and your exercise, you can generate a report.  And the cool thing is that you can generate this report even before you’re done entering your food items or exercise.  This allows you to monitor how you’re doing throughout the day.  So you can make adjustments before the day is over, like eating less or exercising more.

On the Food Diary, click the View Daily Report button.

The daily report contains six sections (click on each link to see):

1. Food Summary
   Tells you the amount of calories for each meal, as well as grams of fat, carbs, and protein.
2. Exercise Summary
   Lists the exercise(s) performed, duration of exercise, and calories burned for each exercise. 
3. Calories Remaining
   Lets you know how many calories left to lose weight or maintain weight. This is big time because it allows you to make mid-day adjustments in your diet and exercise. It is by far the most powerful item on MFD in my opinion.
4. Water Consumption Level
   Shows how much water you have drank in comparison to your water consumption goal. 
5. Projection of Weight Change
   Makes projections of your weight based on the food consumption and exercise for the day.  Provides an estimate for when the goal can be reached. 
6. At a glance
   Provides feedback on exercise and food.