Online Food Journals

I need to stay on top of Web 2.0 trends for my job, so I read Mashable, a social media news site. To my delight, they did a post on 25+ Web Apps for Dieting and Getting Into Shape. This post was right on time since I know that to be successful, I'll need to keep a food diary.

I've done Weight Watchers five times and the thing that always screwed me up was the POINTS system and keeping track of them in a journal. I didn't do it most of the time and it's probably why I never did well on the program. Constantly reading food labels, using the slider to convert everything to POINTS and then writing it down in those little booklets they gave you at your meetings got on my nerves. I need something really simple and easy to use.

As you can see from the upper-right corner, I decided (begrudgingly) on The Daily Plate (TDP). It's not a bad journal, per se, but their Web page layout is horrible. I also tried MyCalorieCounter, DietTV and MyFoodDiary (you gotta pay to play on this one).There are too many ads on MyCalorieCounter and I got too many error pages when I was surfing the site.

I really liked the interface on DietTV. It's clean, it's got nice graphics and it's easy to navigate. Only problem is you have to follow one of the diet plans they list. That's great if you want to use a specific plan and they have 90 you can choose from. I also like that they let you track how much sleep you got because that's an important, yet overlooked, aspect of weight loss. If I was on a specific plan, I would definitely use them.

The charts on MyFoodDiary are overwhelming. After you enter your food for the day, it says, "If every day were like today, you'd..." and they predicted I would gain 10 pounds by August. But according to The Daily Plate, I'm on track.I have no idea who's right, but for now, I'll stick with TDP for a bit and see how it goes. They have free and Gold (paid) membership. You can try Gold for five days and I still can't figure out why it's better than the free membership. Gold gives you a cute weight tracker that you can put on your blog that is supposed to work with Blogger, but when I tried it, it didn't show up in this space. (Hey TDP, you may wanna fix this).

So far I'm having a hard time trying to navigate the site and that doesn't bode well for me sticking with keeping a food journal. Good ol' pen and paper may have to be the way to go. We'll see. Or maybe I'm just cranky and don't feel like trying. Whateverrrr! I'm going through sugar withdrawl!