Tracking Resources

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Diet and Fitness Tracking Software

Diet Power

This software guarantees that if you follow this “coaching” software that it will learn your metabolism, and produce a plan that will help you lose weight (all you need to do is put in what you’ve eaten every day which takes about 5 minutes). They even have a 1 year money back guarantee (including tax and shipping).  It was created by a physicist, some doctors, and it really has a different slant than many of the other titles. Each day it gives you a Nutrition Quotient (NQ) rating for the day. These come in the forms of A, B, C, etc. It also will alert you if you need to drink more water.  You can find it at dietpower.com

Pros: A unique approach to tracking and rewarding the user with feedback. It tracks every nutrient you can think of has the ability to add some of your own items to track.  It also has the ability to export your data so you can use it on more than one computer, or save your data on a usb drive and move from computer to computer.There is an extensive help system that explains everything you are doing and in depth videos that walk you through the whole software. This makes the learning  curve on Diet Power non existent.

Cons: If you  are looking for more of fitness guide ( to track the amount of weight you are lifting,  the size of your body parts), you have a limit of tracking 6 additional items in the software.

FitDay

Fitday has everything you need to stay on track and achieve your goal. Track your foods and get feedback on your calories, carbs, fat, protein, and nutrition. Plan your weight loss and monitor your progress. Track and analyze your activities, metabolism, weight, moods, measurements, and more.

Weight By Date
Losing weight is so much easier when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  A complete weight loss calendar makes it easier to commit to your diet and healthy lifestyle, so you can keep the weight off for good. If you are a visual person, you may want to check out this software. It’s very user friendly, and it predicts when you will reach your goal.  It has many great tools for making tracking of your food and exercise easy (like the ability to copy meals you eat on a regular basis). It also tracks your measurements, and has lots of reports to show your progress. The interface is a great motivational tool. Every aspect of your fitness is right in front of you.

If you are looking for a software for the PC that syncs with your Palm or Pocket PC Weight By Date is another title to consider.  It offers a 30 day trial and there is are basic ($37) and Pro ($57) versions (with money back guarentees) .  This software helps you keep journals to track your food and fitness. You can enter custom recipes, foods, and exercises. The software will provide tools and stats to help you track your progress. You can even put links to your favorite fitness sites (like logicaloss.com) . You can plan your meals ahead as well as your workouts if you wish.  You can find out more and watch an overview tutorials at weightbydate.com

Vidaone

VidaOne Diet & Fitness is an essential personal management tool for all of your diet, exercise and health needs. Track your calorie intake, customize your personal food database, record and analyze workout routines, obtain rich feedback for fitness goals and more.

In my opinion this is for the person who wants to track everything. You can even run reports on how much weight you lifted. You can track measurements, calories burned, make recipes and copy meals (makes data entry a breeze). In my opinion, this is the one software that really tracks everything. That’s a good thing if you are a stat junkie, and watching the numbers will motivate you. It does have an easy interface, but putting in all the specific details (as in I lifted 10 lbs the first set, 15 the second set,) will take more time. However, it’s there if you want it (and most packages don’t get that detailed).

If you have a smart phone, iphone and soon to be (2010) Android phones you can add the mobile version and synchronize your phone to your computer. Click here for more information

Calorie King

You can record everything you eat and the exercise you do using our huge food and exercise database, and then track your weight over time. Our personal profiling feature tells you exactly how many calories you need every day to lose, gain or maintain your ideal body weight. This software synchronizes with the calorie king website. There is a palm version as well. There is a 7 day trial. Click Here.

Life Form

From the same people who created Word Perfect. This was one of the first programs I used.  It can track anything. The one unique feature that I love about this is you can put in your ingredients from Mom’s meatloaf and it will spit out the nutritional value of it.  Find it at www.lifeform.com

Diet and Fitness Tracking Websites

Spark People

Sparkpeople.com has a lot of features (track fitness, food, journal, articles, forums), and a lot of advertising. If you don’t mind the advertisements its a great resource with a large community around it for support. Much like most of the sites in this list, they provide the ability to create a blog (or journal), and they have a large forum area to offer support to its members. You can also create/join a group. I enjoy the information at sparkpeople (they have experts that regularly blog and provide great content. However, the advertising and speed of the site eventually turned me of.

FatSecret.com is a simple to use tool with almost zero advertising. It’s primary function is to track your food and exercise (not so much how much weight you lifted, or details like blood pressure or body fat). If you are someone who has a smart phone, I believe this works on just about any platform (droid, blackberry, iphone).  I know on my droid, I can scan the bar code on the food (video), it shows the foods details, and I can add it to my food diary (not more trying to type on the miniature keyboard). They have challenges, groups, and communities as well at the site. There is no advertising on the site, and just a hint of advertising on their droid ap.

Daily Burn.com
Daily burn is a great website, with very little advertising on it (and it’s free). They also have a huge database of food. Much like the other websites there are forums, articles, and a great tool that emails you with updates on how you are doing (it emailed me after I quit my demo to let me know I need to come back and weigh in – cool). There is a free version that gives you great stats, and there is a premium version version which gives you greater stats (very affordable).