Julie - FitDay.com

Julie, I tried your suggestion of using FitDay.com to log intake and exercise. Its certainly an eye opener. No wonder the scale moves slowly or not at all! I could not believe how those little things add up. I seem to remember you saying you had trouble adding a custom food. Did you find out what the problem was? Have you any idea if there is a limit to the number of custom foods you can add? The only negative comment I have on the site is that most of the items on their food list are measured by "serving" or "cup" while most packages are are labeled with nutrition info by weight. This is misleading as 1/2 cup (4 oz liquid) does not always weigh 4 oz in dry measure. Do you know of any good way to convert this? Thanks for mentioning this several times... FitDay is a real help to me! Windy/Pat

No, I don't know how to convert it, I just generally measure it and go. When I eat liquids though or drink protein, or milk, etc. , I also enter the oz. total in my water entry so that I keep a good total of ALL of the liquid I've consumed through the day. Water can be measured in fl. oz. on Fitday, so it's very accurate. I just enter the nutrition information as listed "per serving" and then I figure whether I ate the entire serving or just a portion of it. An example would be Russel Stover French Mint Miniatures (fabulous, by the way). A serving is 5 pieces, but I generally only eat two, so I entered the nutrition statistics for the entire 5 pc. serving, but then show my amount as .20 ...Does that make sense? When there is no other measurement but a cup, I use decimals for smaller amounts, like .10, or .25 (1/4 cup), etc. and get as close as I can. Remember to check the measurement drop down screen as there are generally several options you can choose from. There is no limit on how many custom foods you can enter, but once you enter alot, you will have to use the drop down and go clear to the bottom of the custom foods list and select "all custom foods" which will open a screen of everything you've put it and you can choose them from there. Is that confusing? I'm trying to make it clear. The only problem I've had with adding foods is that I made a mistake on a couple and I cannot remove them, so I've had to add them again and call them something else. I really do use it every day and have for the past 3.5 months. I also have some charts that I developed on excel where I take the calories, protein and water recorded on fitday and chart it so that I can see about 6 weeks at a glance to see if my protein, etc. is where it needs to be. I could send them to you if you'd like. Thay may sound like overkill for some people, but it helps me so much...otherwise, I'm a grazer who can eat alot more than I realize. Hope this helps. Julie

Julie, Thanks for the tips and here's one for you ---- You can change a custom food. Just go to the bottom of your drop down list, click on ALL CUSTOM FOODS, this will give you a list of them all. Select the food you need to change from your list by double clicking on it. On the page that shows the Nutrition Facts, there is a button that says "Edit this food". You can make any changes on that page. You also have the option to "Delete this food" from that page. That should clear up your stray foods from the custom list! Don't we wi**** were that easy to "delete" them once we've eaten them? Windy/Pat

Thanks. I use it all of the time, but I'm always rushing in and out and don't have time to dig around in it.

Windy, Just checked, if you do a custom food there are two measurements for oz ... one is oz for dry and the other is FL OZ for fluid oz. They are in the drop down menu on the custom food add page. Hope this helps. Mary

Thanks Mary, this certainly does help! Windy/Pat

I was using fitday.com as a pre-op. After surgery I bought the downloadable software (20.00) and it is so much better and more user friendly (for me). the only drawback is that i can only access it from my home computer. You can add recipes and track even more stats than on the web. It also has triple the food entries already in there, so it is realy easy to find stuff. I thought it was a worthwhile investment! Everyone seems to be doing so well on this board! Today i looked at my stats (on fitday) and I am no longer obsese...just happily, blissfully, sucessfully overweight! Liz 238/174/140

Congratulations on your new status! I did consider the PC version of FitDay, but it doesn't have two very important features for me. It does not synchronize with the web version, and/or doesn't have a version that will run and synchronize on a PDA. I use several different computers throughout the day, these are really important to me. Until they get those features, the web version will have to do for me. I've already sent in my "wishes" to the folks that put out FitDay.