As mentioned in the previous post, I had to search for a more efficient way to track my caloric intake. I scoured the web for calorie counters and calorie trackers. I searched for smartphone apps that might work. Some websites or apps would track calories, but you had to figure out for yourself how many calories you were taking in. Others had very complicated ways of tracking your calories. Yet others had food databases where you could enter a meal or a portion and it would figure out your calories and track them. Most of these had limited food databases, of only one, ten or even twenty thousand food items. Trust me, that’s not enough.
Then I found My Plate on www.livestrong.com. It’s part of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation and it has all sorts of tools that will help you live a healthier lifestyle. “My Plate” is essentially a calorie and nutrition tracker. The amazing thing is the scope of foods in the food database! I searched for sorts of weird Asian and Spanish foods and not only did the foods come up in the database, it even listed different brands! I didn't know there were so many varieties of Filipino lumpia. There have been very few foods that I couldn’t find in the database. It's really easy to track calories. What’s more, there is a companion app for a smartphone that ties in with the website so that you can track your calories even when your computer isn’t available. The iPhone app is not very reliable, though, it crashes a lot and sometimes will duplicate food entries willy-nilly. Sometimes it will also record a huge amount of calories for meals that you’ve created on the web site. 300 calories for a cup of coffee? An update of the mobile app is supposed to be on the way.
On the website, you can create meals and accurately track the calories in your recipe. For example, as you build a meal or create a recipe it will track how many calories each component in your recipe has and total up all those calories. Then it divides the total calories by the number of servings your recipe contains. You can even make up those little nutritional data summaries that they put on food containers for your recipes. There are also recipes available from the thousands, maybe millions of other My Plate users. What's fantastic are the results. I've just cracked below 215 pounds and feeling for the first time that I might actually get below 200 pounds again.
Along the way, as you track you daily caloric intake and burn, you can also track your weight loss. The web site gives you these encouraging messages from time to time. I've been religious in recording my food intake and workout calorie burns since I started tracking last March. I haven't missed a day yet. They say that statistically, if you can keep tracking for 90 days, you'll have a much better chance of achieving your weight goals. By the way, Livestrong My Plate isn't just for weight loss, you can track calories for when you need to put on weight too. I haven't tried that part out.. Yet.
The Livestrong websites are full of invaluable information, particularly for cancer victims, and also provides support and information for people suffering from diabetes, etc. They're the most useful, no bull websites you can visit. Thank you Lance Armstrong, for creating the Livestrong Foundation.
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