There are many different types of diets going around. Some are sensible and some are crazy fads.
I’ve tried many diets since I was 13. You will lose weight if you stick to any of these diets. But will you be able to stick to them? Not if you are easily bored like me. SlimFast may be delicious but to eat it day in, day out? Recipe for disaster. I love food and I love variety. If I feel like eating something I want to eat it. If what I want to eat is not on the diet sheet and I still eat it, I feel like a failure and just give up altogether.
When I was growing up I actually thought I looked fine. When I look at old photos I still think I looked fine. Certain people around me said I was fat and I was lead to believe I should diet to shut them up. Well between the ages of 13 and 26 I attempted to diet and just got bigger and bigger. It’s at the age of 26 that I looked in the mirror and I noticed I wasn’t carrying my weight as well as I used to anymore so it was time to lose weight because *I* could see I needed to and not because other people were saying I should. (To those people bringing up children, *please* be careful what you say to them, whether in jest or not, because it can stay with them for life.)
I knew that another diet was not the way to go so I decided to eat whatever I wanted and do lots of exercise. The safest and most effective method of losing weight is simply to eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. The idea being that I would burn more calories than I consumed each day.
While searching the internet for information about the number of calories burnt by doing different activities, I found FitDay.com.
FitDay.com is a free web site designed to help you keep track of your eating and exercise habits. You can enter the foods you eat and it will calculate how many calories you have eaten that day.
Signing Up
To sign up for fitday.com you need to enter a username, password, email address, sex, height, weight (in pounds or kilograms),
age and lifestyle level (sedentary, seated work, standing work, strenuous work).
Once you have logged in you will see a kind of green, khaki, yellow colour scheme. There are link tabs down the left hand side, the main information in the middle, banner adverts on the right hand side and at the top. I’ll go through the link tabs in detail...
~Home~
Here you can change your profile details and preferences. You can also opt to make your journal public. You are given a link to your journal which you can then give to people you know to come and visit. Some people put it on their homepages, or online diary, or share it with members of weight loss groups.
~Foods~
This is where you add the foods you eat on a given day. It has drop down menus so you can browse for a food. Another drop down menu has a list of about 30 of the foods that you have recently added to save you looking it up again.
If the food you want is not there you can click on New Custom Food where you have to add the information into a form. You need to know the calories, total fat, saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, carbohydrate, fibre, protein and alcohol content. There are also boxes for if you know percent daily values of certain vitamins and minerals in the food you are creating. UK foods don’t seem to be required to list the cholesterol, potassium, alcohol and vitamin content of foods. From what I’ve seen, they work out vitamin and mineral percentages in a different way so this aspect of the site is not that accurate. There have been a few times when I’ve typed in the nutritional information exactly as it’s written on the packaging and when I submit it, FitDay tells me it’s impossible to have such a food! Well it actually says “The number of Calories in the food does not match with the amount of fat, carbs, and protein.” And it gives you a formula to prove this
“Cals = fat X 9 + (carb - fiber) X 4 + protein X 4 + alcohol X 7”.
Then you have to fiddle with the numbers a little bit so that FitDay accepts the custom food. Either their formula is too rigid or the food manufacturers are lying on the packaging...
This is an American website so it only lists American foods and uses the American weights system. I was surprised when I typed in aubergine into the search bar and it came up as not found. I thought all common vegetables would be in the database. Then by using google to try and find out the nutritional information for aubergines so I could enter it myself, I discovered that they are known as eggplants in America and many other places too. Learn something new everyday. FitDay.com is obviously easier to use if you are American because you don’t have to make up so many custom foods. I would love to know if there’s a free UK website that has the same features.
As well as the drop down menus, this section has a pie chart showing your calorie breakdown of fat, carbs, protein and alcohol. This is useful for people trying to stick to a low-fat or low-carb diet. Or people like me who just like looking at pie charts. There is also a table showing how many grams and calories you have eaten of fat, carbs, protein and alcohol. These are also shown as percentages and I get a kick out of percentages too (I’m just too sad!) The fats are broken down into saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated and this is useful as we do need fat in our diet but the less saturated fat, the better.
~Activities~
Here you can see a pie chart that shows your calories burned breakdown. This is broken down by BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), Lifestyle Metabolism and Activities. Your BMR is calculated from a formula based on your sex, age, and weight. Your Lifestyle Metabolism is your estimated baseline metabolism (above and beyond your BMR), based on the "Lifestyle Level" you entered in your profile. The activities are what you actually DO.
You can add activities to a list of what you have done. There’s a wide range of activities in the database such as running, aerobics, cycling, walking, cooking and sexual activity. This makes you realise there are lots of ways to keep active and you might not be doing too badly.
~Reports~
Here is where you can generate graphs and charts to show your progress. Examples:
Charts to compare calories eaten to calories burned
Graphs to show how much your weight has changed over time
A chart to show if you are meeting your nutrition requirements
These help to motivate you and keep you on track.
~Weight~
Here you can enter your present weight and your target weight with a deadline date. It then calculates how much you would have to lose per week to reach your goal in the given time. For your own safety and self esteem you should adjust the time so that you are losing about 2lb a week. Even if it takes you over a year to reach your goal, you will be more likely to keep it off. Your skin will also have time to adjust so you are less likely to end up with saggy skin after a huge sudden weight loss.
There is also a Healthy Weight graph with different coloured bands on this page. It has height on one side, weight along the bottom and a blue dot where you are. If your dot is in the red band you are classed as severely overweight, the orange band is moderately overweight and the yellow band is a healthy weight. I was in the red band in January and now I’m in the orange band. I’m not killing myself trying to get to the yellow band but I think it’s do-able.
~Goals~
This is a frilly bit that you might not need. You can choose different goals such as Vitamin C. You can input that you want to have a minimum of 60mg of Vitamin C and a maximum of 100mg per day. In the reports section it will show if you have met this goal on any given day. What you input in the foods section is used to calculate this. This can act as a guide
to see if you need separate
vitamin C tablets or if you get enough from your food. You can do this with a number of
vitamins, minerals and food types.
It would be great if it told you what food you should eat to get these
vitamins. I kept missing my target of
Vitamin K and I didn’t know what I should be eating to get more of it. I may well have been getting enough because if you eat a lot of custom foods and you don’t know their vitamin content then this part of the website is not going to be accurate.
~Journal~
This is just a place to write anything you like about how you are feeling. I never used this.
~Calendar~
Use this page to navigate to different days to see how you did on another day or plan what you’re going to eat in the future.
~Help~
This contains many detailed pages to help you use the site but I found most of it self-explanatory. There is also a privacy policy and contact emails.
~Guidelines~
This section contains a lot of interesting information about healthy living if you haven’t already been bombarded with it throughout your life.
I lost 34lb while using FitDay.com. I enjoyed using it because I find percentages and filling in forms and charts fun for some strange reason. It’s one of my personality traits. Another one of my personality traits is I don’t stick with anything for long so inevitably, I got bored of FitDay.com after four months. I can’t really use it anymore anyway because I’m on a diet for Candida (health reasons, not weight reasons). Too many of the foods I eat aren’t listed in the database and I’m too busy to type all the information in separately. Not only that, sticking to the diet is difficult enough without having to worry about calories as well.
You can use the site in many ways. Examples:
You can type in everything you’ve eaten at the end of the day and think “Well done to me” or “I’m well within my target so I can afford to have a late night snack now” or “Whoops! I ate too much again :(”
You can decide how many calories you want to consume first then plan what you are going to eat at the start of the day to stop you going overboard. Obviously you need will power to stick to what you’ve typed in – the computer isn’t going to get up and block your path to the kitchen.
You can eat what you want to eat, type it in and if you’ve consumed too many calories you can work out how much exercise you should do to burn the excess off.
I would recommend FitDay.com to people who need to keep track of their nutrition and exercise and like facts and figures. It makes you more aware of the foods you’re eating so after a while, having a healthy lifestyle will come naturally and you won’t need to use the website forever.
by (2%):
by (2%):
08.02.2005 01:37
Terrific review. I'll tell people about this site. jan
21.01.2004 16:02
Very good and informative review. It's not a site I need to use since people keep telling me I need to do the opposite, and gain weight. Diamond well deserved. D
21.12.2003 20:29
A very comprehensive review and congrats on the diamond. xx