I came across this website when I was trying to find something/anything to help me figure out my eating conundrum. What should I eat? How much am I eating? Am I eating too much, too little? How many calories am I burning vs. consuming?
This website is part of the Lance Armstrong Live Strong website, and offers so many goodies I don't know where to begin. First and foremost, it does the 2 things I was looking for: it allows me to track all the food I consume in a day and how many calories they are, and it allows me to track the activities I participate in during the day and how many calories they burned.
This "journaling" ability is amazing for a couple of reasons. It gives you the ability to search from what I guess is thousands of foods - from name brand grocery store items, like Maier's bread, to fast food menu items. It allows you to choose how many servings you had, and what time of the day you ate them. And this is the beautiful thing - after you enter a food you ate, it gives you "healthier options." For instance, I entered a slice of cheese, and it gave me options for 2% and fat free or lower calorie cheeses!
It also allows you to track your exercise. It has a drop down menu of activities (alphabetical) that goes on forever, and includes not just your typical exercise, like running or swimming, but mundane things that I would have never even considered exercise, like doing your hair. I don't think I will go so far as to track stuff like housework, but I did love that it allowed me to track spinning and weight lifting, with the number of minutes I participated, and at what intensity level. You can even track your heart rate.
The site will start to keep track of the things you do regularly, and make suggestions on additional things you can do to meet your goals. That's another thing I failed to mention - when I signed up I had to enter my age, height, weight, and daily activity level. I also entered my goal, which was in a drop down menu: 2 pounds of weight loss a week. It told me I needed to consume 1376 calories a day to achieve that goal. The food tracker than tells you throughout the day, as you enter food eaten, how many calories you have left in the day. As I sat here tonight entering all that I had eaten in the day, at the end I was over my allowable number! Yikes! But then, after I entered the exercise I had gotten today, I suddenly got another 800 calories to consume today! Gotta love that! (guess Cheryl was right when she said I needed to eat more)
Beside all of this, the Live Strong website has TONS of articles on health, fitness, nutrition and more. Tons of recipes, meals, diet info, and so much more I couldn't possibly mention them all.
And I noticed there's an I-Phone app that I am just going to have to download!
Here's the best part folks - it's FREE!!!!!!
Love livestrong.com...it's quickly become my favorite site.
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