It’s easy to tell someone that they need to eat healthier, or exercise more, but the more difficult part is helping them actually do it. Fortunately, the internet and rapidly improving technology have led to new and innovative ways to help promote healthier lifestyles. We have put together a list of some of our favorite tools that can help you achieve your nutritional and fitness goals. Give some of these tools a try, and let us know what you think.
FitDay.com
FitDay.com is a great place to track and log your calories. Counting calories is a good way to see what and how much you are actually eating every day. Seeing everything that you eat in a day can be quite the eye opening experience. Although this is a great tool, it is free, and as a result there are a lot of ads on the site. Be careful with those, we almost downloaded free software by accident.
Positives: Easy to use, free, extensive database of foods and their calories
Negatives: Lost of ads, have to manually input some foods for the calorie count, only tracks calories, not other nutrients.
Menustat.org
Menustat.org is a website put together by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that allows you to find nutritional information for foods served at a variety of different, popular restaurants. It’s a very cool way to find out the nutrition facts of the foods you eat away from home. Eating away from home is something a lot of us do frequently. Most menus have no nutritional information, so it is difficult to know what we are eating. Use this website to make sure you know the nutrition facts about the foods you eat when you are dining out.
Positives: Provides nutritional information we usually don’t have access to, easy to search, many pre-defined food categories, allows you to search by different nutrients
Negatives: Limited restaurant database (generally only a few national chains),
Supertracker.usda.gov
Supertracker is another government created tool to help track your calories and nutritional intake. When you register for a free account, this tool will keep track of your daily caloric intake. The additional cool features include targets for empty calories, goals for different food group intake, and tracking of oils and saturated fats. This is a good tool to track what you eat, with the added bonus of providing pre-defined nutritional goals and limits.
Positives: Tracks more than just calories. Good visuals to help show goals, Fairly Easy to use
Negatives: Limited tracking of nutrients
NeoVitin Blog Carb Counter
Allow us to be self-serving for a little bit. As part of Dr. Rybicki’s post on carbohydtrates, we put together a spread sheet where you can keep track of your carbs. We wanted an easy way to keep track of carb intake and keep a running total. It’s free to download, and couldn’t be simpler to use. Pair it with the tools above to track your calories and carbs at the same time.
Positives: Track Carbs, keeps a daily and weekly total of carb intake
4 Free Tools to Help with your Nutrition Goals
FitDay.com
FitDay.com is a great place to track and log your calories. Counting calories is a good way to see what and how much you are actually eating every day. Seeing everything that you eat in a day can be quite the eye opening experience. Although this is a great tool, it is free, and as a result there are a lot of ads on the site. Be careful with those, we almost downloaded free software by accident.
Positives: Easy to use, free, extensive database of foods and their calories
Negatives: Lost of ads, have to manually input some foods for the calorie count, only tracks calories, not other nutrients.
Menustat.org
Menustat.org is a website put together by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that allows you to find nutritional information for foods served at a variety of different, popular restaurants. It’s a very cool way to find out the nutrition facts of the foods you eat away from home. Eating away from home is something a lot of us do frequently. Most menus have no nutritional information, so it is difficult to know what we are eating. Use this website to make sure you know the nutrition facts about the foods you eat when you are dining out.
Positives: Provides nutritional information we usually don’t have access to, easy to search, many pre-defined food categories, allows you to search by different nutrients
Negatives: Limited restaurant database (generally only a few national chains),
Supertracker.usda.gov
Supertracker is another government created tool to help track your calories and nutritional intake. When you register for a free account, this tool will keep track of your daily caloric intake. The additional cool features include targets for empty calories, goals for different food group intake, and tracking of oils and saturated fats. This is a good tool to track what you eat, with the added bonus of providing pre-defined nutritional goals and limits.
Positives: Tracks more than just calories. Good visuals to help show goals, Fairly Easy to use
Negatives: Limited tracking of nutrients
NeoVitin Blog Carb Counter
Allow us to be self-serving for a little bit. As part of Dr. Rybicki’s post on carbohydtrates, we put together a spread sheet where you can keep track of your carbs. We wanted an easy way to keep track of carb intake and keep a running total. It’s free to download, and couldn’t be simpler to use. Pair it with the tools above to track your calories and carbs at the same time.
Positives: Track Carbs, keeps a daily and weekly total of carb intake
Negatives: None, we made it…(Just kidding)