Body Conscious Ramblings

Counting calories can become very tedious if not down right impossible, if you have a family, a job, an animal or two and plenty of other things to do on a daily basis. I’ve tried it before and failed every single time. Recently though I found it increasingly important to find out how much calories I am consuming. I know exactly what comes in and how much (as in the volume), but calories can be a little bit more complicated. And why exactly do I want to know all the numbers? Well, even though I’ve never been a stickler for counting calories I’ve decided that to know exactly how much to eat to loose my body fat it’s essential for me to know the deficit I have to make in order to achieve my goals. I’ve tried many things:

1. Counting them by myself based on the nutritional info on packages! – didn’t work because most things I eat don’t come in a package and it became more of a chore than anything else.

2. Using various websites and/or applications – they never had the product brands that I’ve used and as a result the calorie count was never accurate.

Yesterday I came across www.livestrong.com and I am searching no more! Why is it good? It’s good because it takes literally no effort to compile a day’s worth of meals, it has virtually ALL product brands, it remembers foods already used in a meal, it is accurate and does all the calculations and additions for you. Once the day is done, you can export a table with all the numbers (see the links at the bottom of the post).

Here are some snapshots:

Here is where you add your foods and/or fitness activity

Once the food entered a list of possible entries pops up

And here is your compiled info on the meals with totals for each meal

Next daily and weekly totals

Here is my menu for July 5 2010. My totals and fitness activity are here.

ps. Ok, there is one thing that I don’t like about this calorie counter. It doesn’t break down nutrients into, for example fats into saturated, unsaturated, mono- and poly- unsaturated and trans. Same for sugars and carbs, there is no way of knowing where they came from unless you analyze the food list. But that’s something I can live with.

Menu for July 6th.