Helpful Tips To Use FitDay To Record Your Diet

As I mentioned in my previous post, one effective scientifically proven method to help yourself lose weight is to simply record what you eat. After using fitday for a week, I thought that I would share some tips:

1) Record what you eat. While it is best to record what you eat immediately on the computer, it might not be possible. Since I haven't worked up the courage to whip out a piece of paper to write down what I have eaten while I was out at lunch, I try to record what I ate in the evening or the following morning. It takes a bit of effort to remember what you ate, but I usually come reasonably close.

2) Measure your food. That means using dry and liquid measuring cups and spoons. Remember, this is the Scientific Dieting and Exercise Blog. Scientists make observations by taking measurements and weighing things. You might want to buy yourself a kitchen scale, if you don't already have one.

3) Break down each meal into its parts, such as "cooked spaghetti, crushed tomatoes, garlic, onions, olive oil, ground beef" rather than "spaghetti with meat sauce".

3) Don't worry too much about finding a specific brand. If you can't find "Whole Foods 93% Lean Ground Beef", just use 95% ground beef. Or, you can create a custom food by using the nutrition information on CalorieKing.

4) Make sure to record your weight every day. (This will be a topic for a future blog post)

5) Once you have spent a week or two recording your meals, you can easily recreate meals by using the drop down menus in custom and recent foods to add multiple foods to your diary.

6) Be honest. Try not to lie about what you have eaten. Garbage in, garbage out. If you lie about what you have eaten, you are only cheating yourself. This is easier said than done. Right now, I am refusing to add the samples I ate at Whole Foods yesterday (Guacamole, salsa, 2oz of cheese, and olives) to my log. I feel that they shouldn't count. This is my mental illness, damn it!

7) The custom nutrition tab at the bottom of the page is very useful for tracking sodium and cholesterol intake, since these aren't provided in the regular daily reports.

8) Every week, make sure to click the reports tab, and run a few different reports. My favorite is the Nutrition Facts report, because it breaks down all of the important information for you. This allows you to see what you have been doing right and wrong. In my case, I need to eat about 200 calories less and cut out 2 grams of saturated fat or so. I should probably be drinking more milk. This is my report for the first week:

Calories 1,922.9 Calories from Fat 490.4 Fat 55.9 g 86 % Saturated Fat 15.7 g 78 % Polyunsaturated Fat 10.0 g Monounsaturated Fat 23.4 g Cholesterol 165.0 mg 55 % Sodium 3,715.5 mg 155 % Potassium 5,050.9 mg 144 % Carbohydrate 260.2 g 87 % Dietary Fiber 38.2 g 153 % Protein 105.5 g 211 % Alcohol 4.2 g
Vitamin A 444 % Calcium 125 % Vitamin D 27 % Thiamin 111 % Niacin 112 % Vitamin B6 130 % Phosphorus 160 % Selenium %	Vitamin C 435 % Iron 98 % Vitamin E 43 % Riboflavin 138 % Vitamin B12 90 % Manganese 199 % Copper 99 % Magnesium 107 % Zinc 89 %