Do you track?

I know that when I was losing weight, I found that tracking both my activity levels and intake really helped me manage my weight loss. Often if I found my weight loss stalling, I'd check and find that my caloric intake was too low or I wasn't getting enough protein in. When I'd make the appropriate adjustments, I'd get going again. The other thing I found was that when tracking my activity I realized that I needed to up my caloric intake a bit to be sure that I was getting that baseline of 800 to 1000 calories a day to be sure that I didn't drop into starvation mode where your body gets more efficient with less calories.

Now, that I've lost the excess weight and shifted to the maintenance phase of my journey, I find that I don't journal my intake or activity nearly as much as used to. Now, I only do it if I see a trend occurring that I don't like... Either dropping or gaining too much weight. When I look at my logs, I find that I can actually see what I'm doing and when I make the appropriate corrections, so that I'm getting in enough protein, my weight balances out very quickly. 

I have tried Fitday, Sparkpeople and LiveStrong/MyDailyPlate. I really like www.mydailyplate.com the best so far because I don't have to reinvent the wheel when I'm logging my food choices. I like the graphic pie chart that immediately shows me a visual so I can 'see' if my proportion of protiens, carbs and fats are on track. 

So, my question is do you track your intake or activity? Have you found it helpful? Which tools have you tried and which do you like?

I like to track in a notebook.  Its something I can carry with me everywhere!  The graphs & charts are nice, but not nice enough for me to consider switching to the internet for tracking.

I think that to track or not to track is a personal decision; as is, how you do it. My husband was like you and really preferred to track on a notebook he kept with him. He switched to transferring that information to the computer because that gave him feedback. Not in the form of graphs, but know the nutritional value of things. As he did that, he was surprised that his 'impression' were different than reality. That said, I don't think it matters how you track, if the way you do it works for you and your lifestyle.

Since I'm just out of surgery by 5 weeks & haven't started eating regular food just yet I'm really only tracking protein & caloric intake.  Once I start eating regular food I might consider taking time once a week to input my meals on to a site for other nutritional insight if I get to a point where I'm stalling or something like that.  :)

I'm only 11 days post-op...but, since starting on full liquids along with oatmeal, cream of wheat, mashed poatoes, etc I have been logging my intake and exercise on the Realize site and it tells me caloric intake, fat, protein and carbohydrates.

I use the Realize My Success website to track. I hear OH has one too. I am going to check it out.

I love to track did it on WW before this, on realize site now but not as wild about that.  Sparkpeople is good has a good list of foods.  My main issue is really in the database of the cataloged foods.  The calorie info doesnt match or you have to manually enter in everything.  But I can say after doing this for 2 years prepping for WLS its a habit no matter what you use and its a great tool

I track it on my iTouch, its a app called Loseit and its free.  I can carry my I touch with me everywhere and log my intake while i'm eating so I have instant results.