How to Count Your Calories

There are a lot of great ways to keep track of the calories you consume each day. While some people like to grab a couple of books and a notebook to carry with them, I prefer to track my calories online. This also helps to keep me accountable with the other members of my local fitness and weight-loss group.

There are a lot of great websites out there for counting calories and logging exercise. For years, I was a member of FitDay. Fitday's website is located at www.fitday.com. I was able to keep track of what I ate and how much I exercised. This enabled me to make small adjustments to keep on track. At times, though, Fitday's website was a bit frustrating to use - a lot of convenience food items were not loaded into their software, so I would have to enter all the information myself, or just guess. In addition, FitDay was a bit cumbersome, and took a bit more time to use than I would have liked. Even with those issues, FitDay was a great website. However, when I moved to a new town a couple of years ago, and transferred to a new office, I was no longer able to access this website from my work computer during my lunch breaks, so I had to look for an alternative solution.

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After much searching, I found The Daily Plate. The Daily Plate's website is located at www.thedailyplate. The website is very user-friendly. You can set up a profile in just minutes, and get started tracking your food consumption. In addition, The Daily Plate has many convenience foods already pre-loaded into their system, like the Lean Cuisine frozen dinners that I eat for lunch. This allows me to quickly enter my food for the day, and move on.

Also, The Daily Plate has a great exercise tracker. You can track the amount of activity you do each day, including housework and laundry, and you can find out how many calories you burned. Perhaps my favorite part of The Daily Plate's website is the way you can set a weight-loss goal, and the site helps you know how you are doing. I entered my starting height and weight, and told the software that I would like to lose 2 pounds a week. (I really don't, but wanted to test it out).

The site told me how many calories I could have each day. As I ate calories, it added up my totals, and then as I added exercises in, it subtracted the calories I had burned from my daily total, and showed me my net caloric intake.

If you do better as a part of a group, The Daily Plate also has lots of exercise and fitness groups that you can join. Some of these groups even meet offline. They are great for daily inspiration and motivation, and the message boards/blogs are easy to add to. If you don't find a group that suits you, you are also free to start your own.

No matter how you choose to count your calories, good luck to you in reaching your goals!