I want to track what I eat for a while, not necessarily to count calories and loose weight, but to see how healthy or unhealthy my diet is, what ratio of carbs, fat & protein I'm eating, etc, so I tried some of the recommendations in this thread and wanted to share my opinions. All of these offer free versions, some have pay-for versions with more features, all of these are web based, but some offer smart phone versions. I only tested the free, web-based versions:
FitDay - this is the first one I tried because I see it's mentioned a lot here, and is highly recommended on the blog Mark's Daily Apple which I've been reading. Overall, I felt this site was pretty good, but it's loaded with ads and I found it extremely slow to use. I installed an ad blocker and that helped considerably but it was still so slow, that I wanted to look for something better. Some comments:
- food tracker does not categorize meals separately (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks). Maybe not a big deal, but when I tried other trackers that did categorize meals, I found that helpful, especially when it let you copy meals between days.
- does not appear to have the large database of brand-name foods that other trackers do.
- cannot see other user-contributed foods as you can on some other sites (which is how other sites get a big database of brand name foods)
- cannot copy food or meals from previous days
- nice, basic selection of reports and charts, and I like how a small user-selectable chart appears on every page, that is, you don't need to go to a separate section of the website to see a chart of how you're doing.
Cronometer - pretty nice, but limited reporting and the food database was not very comprehensive, so I kept looking. Comments:
- food tracker does not categorize meals separately (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks).
- not many brand name foods in database - no user contributed foods, just very generic stuff like "corn-based, extruded, puffs or twists, cheese flavor" as opposed to "Cheetos". The generic entry is probably good enough in most cases, but for some foods I think having the exact brand name food in the database does make a big difference.
- very quick and easy data entry for food log, quick and easy to edit existing entries, and you can drag & drop to rearrange entries in your log
- can copy one or more foods by by cutting and pasting from other days - a bit tedious
- detailed nutrition breakdown & chart on the food logging page - lots of information in 1 place, but almost too much detail!
- reports are pretty limited
MyFitnessPal - I like this one a lot - of the 4 trackers I tired, this has the BEST method for adding food to your log - very quick, very easy, many options - by far the best! But it had the absolute worst selection of reports and I don't see the point of logging what you eat if you can't get some basic analysis of that data. In their user forums, it seems that their smart phone app has some better reporting tools, but users are still asking for more. If this tracker had some better reporting, I'd probably have stopped looking for something better. Comments:
- very quick & easy data entry
- clean, uncluttered user interface
- VERY EXTENSIVE database of brand name foods (user contributed) - nearly everything I tried searching for!
- can easily give feedback on accuracy of user contributions
- nice food database search page
- categorizes meals separately (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks)
- easy to copy meals to/from different days
SparkPeople - This is the one I settled on. Data entry is pretty quick and easy, the food database is pretty extensive (but still not as extensive as MyFitnessPal's), reporting is very good. This is a very professionally run (ie slick) website. My initial impression was that there was too much 'stuff' on it - recipes, exercise videos, information on various health conditions, etc. - I figured I could get that information from any number of websites and I didn't want it cluttering up my food tracker. But after using it for 2 weeks, I don't mind the extra 'stuff' at all, and having a new exercise video available every day on my login page has actually motivated me to try a few new exercises. This site as a lot of good features which I'm still exploring, but I've decided to stick with SparkPeople and don't feel the need to look any further. Comments:
- categorizes meals separately (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks)
- easy to copy meals to different days
- easy to create 'food groups' for foods you frequently eat together. I find this especially useful for entering my typical breakfasts.
- very good selection of reports
- the most useful report for me is the 'daily feedback': it gives you a nice group of charts showing how you met your goals for the current day, and the past 7 days. Goals are your target range for calories, fat, carbs, cholesterol, etc. If you see that you've gone over or under your goal for something, like carbs for example, you can click on that point on the chart, and it pops up a window with your food log for that day, showing the the carb count each food, making it simple to see where you went astray.
I'm sure there are many other good trackers out there, but I just wanted to share my opinion of these 4.
). I haven't tried any of the other software or websites so I don't know how it compares with them. Here's a link to the download page:
