Useful Calorie Trackers

Many of us know that if we are serious about losing weight we need to keep track of the number of calories we take in. We need to know how many we are eating (it's also good to know how many you are expending so that you can ensure that you are expending more than you are taking in.)

Unfortunately it isn't always easy or pleasant to accurately track calories but now there are some quite good online calorie trackers that also make use of mobile apps.

Here is a little info on four good ones:

CalorieKing.com - $12 – the mobile apps (apple and android) are at gomeals.com

Features an exercise log and you can set nutrition targets. It is easy to use and has a thorough list, though some ethnic foods are not available. Great for browsing for additional info about healthy eating.

MyFoodDiary.com - $9 – mobile apps (all mobile OS's) included

Easy to read graphs and nutrition labels. Good quality database, searching can take time. To get an item's calorie count you have to click on it to get its nutritional information label

MyNetDiary.com - $9 – free version available but doesn't provide a daily food analysis – mobile apps included (apple, android, & blackberry)

You can customize to track nutrients and also features exercise tracking. Excellent, quick food input, large community database. As-you-type search feature guesses the item you want to select.

MyFitnessPal.com – free – apple, android & blackberry

Recipe builder and an active online community are nice extras. Easy-to-use, some irrelevant search results. Few bells and whistles made the information from the food diary easy to understand

All four are fairly accurate in calorie counting with MyFoodDiary and MyNetDiary the most precise. Although on a test day the four sites were within 311 calories of each other, which isn't too bad.

I haven't tried these myself the information above was taken from a WSJ article.

I do think that I will give one of them a try and see how easy it is and how beneficial. Although I am not sure I want to start today – it's St Patrick's Day and I am sure my input will be greater than my output!

Which reminds me – keep in mind not to obsess about calorie intake – the most important thing is that you are eating fewer calories than you are expending!