very useful website

I recently discovered a really cool website: My Calorie Counter (see link on sidebar). On it, you can enter the foods you eat and track not only your calories for each day, but also other things like fat, cholesterol, sodium, fiber, protein, etc. You can set it up with your target totals for all these things, and it will keep a running total and tell you what your remaining balance is for each. You can also enter your exercise each day, and it will subtract those calories for you. It has a large database of foods, so once you look up a food and enter it in your journal, it will save that food so you don't have to look it up again. If you can't find a food, you can do a custom entry and enter the info yourself - again, it will save it so you only have to enter it once. Be careful - I did find that on some of the foods its database has, the info differed somewhat from what it said on my food packaging. If there was much of a difference, I just created a custom entry for that food using the info on the packaging. If, like me, you tend to eat a lot of the same foods from one day to another, it will initially be somewhat time-consuming to enter everything for the first time, but once you've got most of your foods entered, subsequent entries will be very quick. It's really user-friendly and pretty efficient. There are other tools as well, including a measurements tracker, a blog, etc.

It's pretty neat to see everything laid out in front of you in black and white, so I'd definitely recommend giving it a try! To have access to all of the features, you do have to pay a membership fee - you can pay $20 for 6 months or $35 for a year, so it's pretty cheap. I'm going to try it for 6 months and see what I think.