If you want to watch what you eat and lose a little weight, you may be interested in Livestrong’s MyPlate Calorie Tracker.
MyPlate is available on the web and iPhone, for Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 (whatever that is). You set up your profile on their website, including some basics like how much you weigh, how tall you are, what your activity level is, and what your weight goal is (gain, maintain, or lose). Based on this information, the program gives you a daily calorie allowance for meeting your weight goal over time.
During the day you can quickly and easily add the foods you eat into the food diary. When you exercise you can track your activity and the program will automatically figure out the equivalent calories for the workout and add it to your outstanding calorie balance. So if you’re cutting it close come the end of the day but can’t resist a McDonald’s sundae, bust a move and burn some calories. It’ll free up the calories you need for the sundae and you can stay within your daily goal!
The site and apps have a wide variety of exercises and levels, in contrast to most other offerings that give you a flat calorie count for each exercise. If you add yoga for example, it offers Hatha, power & bikram – you can narrow down the exercise to get a count that is more realistic to what you’re doing.
You can track breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and water with the app, and it syncs with the website so it’s independent of where you are. No more trying to remember what you had and entering it all in at once. Real time calorie counting is the way to go!
Of course, every few days or so, it doesn’t hurt to weigh yourself and add it into the chart. The site and app will then graph your progress so you can see where you’re at with your goal, and you can link weight loss with your food diary to see what works best.
This app is the best calorie tracking app / website that I’ve used. Hands down. Why?
First off, pretty much every food item you could ever eat is in the database, and it’s continually being updated by users. On other sites I’ve found it’s not always possible to be precise, and I’ve had to substitute other brands or products. With Livestrong I haven’t failed to find what I want once. If you’re munching on a new product and have the box handy, you can always add the food to the system by punching in all the nutritional information yourself. Then that product is available for others to add to their own food diaries. Nothing like making a contribution to the site to help make it bigger and better!??
The best part of this app is that you can add in your own recipes. Say I have a recipe for family lasagna. Sure, you could go in and add a random lasagna to your food diary, but you wouldn’t have accurate nutritional information. With the Livestrong MyPlate Calorie Counter, you can actually construct a recipe. For lasagna, I would add in my pound of ground beef, my jar of tomato sauce, the noodles, etc. Then I would create the recipe and name it whatever I want, say, “Family Lasagna.” Then, if I ate a tenth of the lasagna, I could add the item to my food diary and punch in .10 to record the exact nutritional totals for my dinner. This is one of the things that sold me on the app; I make a lot of meals at home from scratch.
If you’re serious about eating right, working out, and watching your water intake, I would highly recommend the MyPlate Calorie Tracker. Whether you’re hitting the fast food restaurants or making all your meals from home, you will be able to track anything and everything. You can’t go wrong with such an intuitive, thorough service!
Sara’s rating: 5/5!