Wednesday, November 12, 2008

An Attempt at Being Healthier

My aunt was telling me the other day about this website, LiveStrong, and that she was going to start "counting calories" on it (it's called "The Daily Plate"). So I told her I'd check it out and see what it was all about. It's actually not just counting calories, which I'm not really into, but more of seeing a breakdown of what you eat on a daily basis, as well as what kind of "exercise" you get.

So this is basically how it works:

1. Set up a profile and you enter some personal info, such as age and weight, and it helps calculate your calories and such.

2. Then you can start adding what you eat daily. They have a huge database of foods and all you have to do is search for items. For example, today I had Split Pea Soup by Eating Right. All I did was search for that and all the nutritional info. came up and I just "added" it to today's plate. You can also add meals. Most work days I have a Kashi bar and a coffee, so I create a meal called "breakfast" and I add the whole meal every day. You can also create "recipes" (last night I made stuffed chicken, so I created a recipe for it). For each food item you add to your plate, you can also adjust the serving size. If the serving size is 1 cup, and you had 2 cups, you would adjust the serving size to twice that amount. Easy peasy.

3. Add various "exersizes" for the day. They have a ton of different things to choose from. Different speeds of walking, gym, various sports, even household chorse like doing laundry or the dishes. For each activity you can input how long you performed for. All of these things a subtracted from your dairly calorie intake.

This is what my Daily Plate looked like yesterday (there's also a pie chart they show you that breaks down protien vs carbs vs fat-not shown here, as well as other charts)
There's a lot more to the site as well, I highly suggest you check it out (maybe even join?). You can add friends and check out what they are eating, and you can also create groups for people to join. There's also tons and tons of information. Oh and they have an application for iPhone as well ;) (check out the Dares portion of it too-it's not all about eating and exersizing).

So I started that this weekend and have had no problem taking a few minutes every day inputting what I ate and any exersize I did (you can even enter things from a few days back). Though it may not be pretty sometimes (like the other day with my pumpkin bread, hot chocolate, and white mocha!), but it makes me actually want to do less of the CRAP eating (eww not literal crap!), and getting more exersize.

If anyone wants to join, let me know :) I'd love to see what you're eating!

6 comments:

Talia said...

that's really neat. I wouldn't even dare to start it now, because I shudder to think of seeing my pregnancy diet in black and white calories on there :), but I will definitely keep it in mind for when I need the motivation afterwards!

Sarah said...

I am totally going to give this a try!

sarah marie p said...

Noooo I will not tell you what I'm eating! Oh wait, I just did, on twitter -- a million spicy nacho Doritos! yumm. So bad.

shanics said...

What a great idea...you have a very smart, creative, and thoughtful aunt ;)
I paid for the "gold memebership" and it has a lot more features...ie, sodium break downs. Yah, for daily plate!!!

Mermanda said...

I used this for a few weeks last year. It was pretty interesting. I think I am at a point where I am comfortable with my diet and don't need the constant monitoring of calories, but it was a great way to get a grasp of how many calories I was consuming per day.

Unknown said...

I'll give this a try and tell you what I think. So far I've been using meal plans 101 to figure my daily calorie intake, but this actually sounds like fun. Great post!