Mynetdiary.. A great free site to help with weight loss

My new favorite site: mynetdiary.com. It's also an app for IPAD and IPHONE. And it rocks. Here's why:

1. Depending on your weight loss goal, it estimates how many calories you should be eating daily calculated based on your height, weight, and activity level.

2. It then provides you with an easy online food diary whereby you enter the foods you eat and it tracks your calories, fat, carbs, and protein levels.

3. The diary is super easy to use because almost any food you can think of is already loaded into the database. For the ones that aren't, you can enter them yourself (I've entered most of my favorite foods into the database).

4. Ummm. It's free. You go to www.mynetdiary.com and sign up, entering a username and password. Done.

Here's how it looks in pictures:
                                                                                                  

Here's an example. For a 140 lb woman, lightly active, who is 5"4 who wants to lose 20 lbs by Mar 1 (4 months from now), she'd have to eat 1331 calories per day, which would result in 1.5 lbs loss per week. Remeber, it's your goal. If you want to lose a pound of week, set it up as such. If you want to lose 2 lbs, per week, go ahead. I don't recommend more than 2 lbs per week though.. slow and steady wins the race to a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.

Next, you hit food and your food diary appears:

Now's the fun part. Start typing the food you ate and you'll see that it's probably there. It can be frustrating in the beginning to find the food that best matches, but you'll get the hang of it quickly. The database is huge. Almost all foods can be found. And the ones that aren't there, you can enter into the database yourself. I'll show you how in a minute. First, let's enter one of my fave breakfasts when I'm in a rush (I also have this as a bedtime snack sometimes **I'll often have egg white poppers on the side to up the protein content ** see my first blog entry for recipe):

As you can see, I've entered Nature's Path Kamut Puffs cereal (1 cup) which has 50 calories; 3 tbsp blueberries which has 15 calories; and 1/2 cup Blue Diamond Almond Breeze unsweetened vanilla almond milk which has 20 calories. So, this meal has a total of 85 calories (pretty good hey.. considering most cereals have double that before you even add the milk..)

Let's say, you can't find the food you ate. No prob. You just enter it yourself. You click new food and then you enter the nutritional info for the food and voila, it's in the site for everyone to benefit from. As you'll see, I've added a lot of my favorite foods recommended in The Rebel Diet so they should be easy to find.

This is a really helpful and user-friendly program/app. It can really help you keep track of what you're eating and may help reveal certain problems in your diet (i.e. too many unaccounted for calories or too little protein or too many carbs, for example). You may realize that you're eating nutritiously but consuming way more calories than you think; or maybe your ratio is all off and you're eating way too little protein and this is throwing off your hormonal balance. I'd recommend you play with the program and experiment. You have nothing to lose. Well... maybe a few pounds. Ha ha ha.

Have fun!

p.s. Thank you to one of my patients who introduced me to this program. Very cool.