One of the revolutions in personal diet management in the 2000s has been online diet-tracking software. Two of the leaders in this personal tracking area are Fitday.com and LiveStrong.com’s The Daily Plate. Both play an important role in improving the health of Internet-connected people everywhere, but have strengths and weaknesses
1. Fitday.com. If you are extremely detail-oriented, you’ll love Fitday. It gives you details on everything you eat, and you can break it down by macro and micro-nutrients. If you purchase Fitday PC, you can track everything without having an Internet connection, and it offers much more detailed reporting. With personal customizable foods, easy data entry, and superb reporting tools, it’s a great combination of ease-of-use with advanced reporting and monitoring tools. Even more advanced reporting and utilities, as well as freedom from advertisements, are available with their Premium membership.
2. Livestrong.com’s The Daily Plate. This has a much, much larger database of foods than fitday.com because users can submit foods for everybody else. This makes it really nice for quick look-ups for on-the-go food tracking. You can even use an iPhone app to look up your food and put it in while eating on the road. Easy-to-use web interface, plugins to both Facebook and Twitter, it’s nice. Through their association with LiveStrong.com, The Daily Plate now has the benefit of large user groups, online forums, and social networking for fitness nuts. Big downsides: unless you buy a Gold membership, you can’t get detailed micro-nutrient tracking like on fitday.com, and eventually they delete your food history (not sure how far back it goes before they delete).
I used Fitday for my last twelve-week challenge; I’m using Livestrong’s Daily Plate this time around. I miss the detailed micro-nutrient tracking, but since I already have a pretty good idea of where my diet put me last time and I’m eating similar stuff (hey, I lost over 20 pounds of fat and put on 6 pounds of muscle, I’ll stick with the plan!) I know what the deficiencies tend to be. Basically I take a twice-daily multivitamin pack and eat plenty of spinach and other potassium-rich foods.
If you’re looking for some way to track everything you eat, both fitday.com and livestrong.com’s Daily Plate are superb resources with active communities of users and support. Heck, why not try both and swap between them based on your current needs? That’s what I’m doing, and both work really well to help me stay honest on my diet and fitness regimen.
–Matt B.
Anything vs. SparkPeople
i joined Sparkpeople.com in early May and for the first two months things were average. but then they changed some IT stuff and it seems like there are problems everywhere. You’d think with as many people they have helping out that they could figure out the bugs in the system. today I have decided to print out my old reports from the last few months and move back to fitday.com … I left, thinking the community involvement would help, but I feel like I spend way too much time pumping everyone else and losing time for myself. I like dailyplate, but was unaware they delete your info after a period of time. thanks for having this article out there for me to make a decision upon!