I know at least a few of you have seen me talk about losing weight and staying in shape. The basic refrain of it is "eat less and exercise more."

These can be difficult to quantify precisely, so I've recommended that people keep a food journal of some sort to track actual calorie intake. There's a somewhat elaborate Excel spreadsheet that I use and have posted here for anyone else to use.

A few days ago, though, I discovered SparkPeople.com. It's a free site that makes keeping track of what you consume, when and how you exercise, and other fitness and health-related goals easy. I'm really impressed with its interface, food database, exercise database, calorie calculations, nutrient tracking, and reporting capabilities. It also has an active, helpful community.

I'd recommend that anyone interested in losing weight or getting in better shape check it out. The interface can be a bit much at first, but once you get used to the layout it's well organized and easy to navigate.

Could be useful for me at the moment. Thanks for the info.

I posted about fitday.com a few months back: link [www.theforumsite.com]

I found it very helpful at first, but later got annoyed because the search options for the food database were kinda annoying to navigate. I mostly was entering foods myself manually, so that was okay.

I shall give this a try! Cheers.

edit - Oh, I guess I mentioned sparkpeople I never tried it out

I've had to enter a couple of things, but I'm used to doing that anyway because I did everything manually before.

One of the best places for looking up food nutrition info is the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory. It's not great for looking up preprepared or packaged foods, but for commodities like produce and meats it's the best there is.

SparkPeople tells me that I don't eat enough calories almost every day

Thats a great site, thanks for sharing

I'll give it a try. I have grown sick of Livestrong.com 4 various reasons

Sorry to be a right pain but could you find one on how to gain weight