Studies have found that people who track their food intake are more successful in losing weight and keeping the weight off. There are a number of websites that allow you to track your food so that you understand exactly what you are eating. My favorite site for tracking food is SparkPeople. SparkPeople offers so many features that I won’t talk about all of them here. I’ll look at a few of the features that I find most useful.
Nutrition Tracker
The Nutrition Tracker allows you to enter the foods you eat at each meal so that you can monitor your calories, carbs, fat, and protein. You can also track other items, such as fiber, saturated fat, and iron. To add food to your Nutrition Tracker, you just click the Add a Food button, and then choose from the large food database. If there are foods that you eat on a regular basis, you can add them to your Favorites so that you can just choose them from your customized favorites list. You can also create Food groupings of foods that you frequently eat, so that you can add the food group with just one click.
When you first join SparkPeople, you’ll answer a few questions to help you to determine the recommended calories, fat, protein and carbs. SparkPeople will create a meal plan for you based on the data you give. You can print your weekly meal plan, and even print a shopping list for the foods you will need that week. I don’t use the meal plans, but I think that they could be very helpful for some people.
Many people underestimate the amount of calories that they are consuming. The Nutrition Tracker is an invaluable resource that can help to teach you the correct portions for your body size.
SparkRecipes
If you need to calculate the nutritional information for your recipes, you can use the recipe calculator. You will probably find many of your foods in the SparkPeople database. You can even store your recipes in your own online recipe box. I find this feature extremely helpful, since it helps me to determine the correct portion size for my own recipes. It is also great to be able to store my recipes and then easily retrieve them when needed.
You can also check out the thousands of recipes entered by SparkPeople users. I review these recipes carefully, since I find that some of the recipes contain a little too much sugar and fat.
Fitness Tracker
The Fitness Tracker will set up an exercise program that includes both cardio and strength exercises. But if you do not want to use the suggested program, you can just track the time you spend on your exercises. The Fitness tracker allows you to keep track of the calories your burn in your exercises.
Reports
One of the most useful features of SparkPeople is the ability to generate reports. Below are a few of the reports that you can view:
- Daily calories breakdown – A pie chart that shows how many calories each food item contributed to your total caloric intake.
- Daily nutrition report – A list of all of the foods eaten in one day, along with the nutritional details for each food item.
- Calories and nutrients over time – A line graph that shows your intake of calories each day and your intake of the nutrients you are tracking such as fat, protein, fiber, calcium, etc.
- Weekly progress – A chart that shows you an overview of the foods you ate in a specified week. You can view the calories and nutritional information for each day.
- Calorie differential – A bar graph that shows your average daily calories consumed each week, along with the calories burned through exercise and your basal metabolic rate (the calories you use for basic functions).
There are other reports available, but you will probably find that the reports above will be the most useful. If you are trying to lose some weight, these reports are invaluable, since they tell you if you are eating the correct amount of food and if you are exercising enough.
I like SparkPeople because it is a free resource that people can use to learn how to adopt a more healthy lifestyle. If you start recording your food, you will probably find out that you have been eating and drinking more calories than you thought!
If you would like to give it a try, you can join SparkPeople and then start using the free resources. It takes only a little of your time, but you will learn a lot about what you are eating and be able to modify your eating habits so that they are consistent with your personal health goals.