Concept2 Forum

Do any of you use exercise/diet software? I've been playing with CrossTrainer, but it seems like overkill and is a bit complicated. I'm also exploring FitDay which seems a little more user friendly. Right now I track my rowing data in Excel, which is great for those metrics, but a diet tracking system is certainly a more complex beast. I'm trying to find something that contains both elements, and as a beginner, I figure I don't need anything too fancy.

Scott,

I monitor my BMR (not BMI) on occassion to find out what my minimum caloric intake should be assuming I played couch potatoe all day. I've used this to see what the BMR would be at various weights. I use the formula that Eddie Fletcher provides in his marathon training manual to help see my average caloric output above the BMR based on the watts I produce rowing. But these are mostly just guides and extra knowledge and I don't track them everyday. Just on whims like, "well I rowed 2x45' so how many calories was that?" (Followed by, "how many scoops of ice cream does that equate too?" )
I have yet to see any food journal programs that really let you gauge the amount of calories you consume unless you methodically weigh every thing you eat and know the exact content of every serving you consume. To me this is a real pain and not that useful.
Eat moderate portions of food served (you know when there's too much on the plate) and paying attention to make sure you're eating a variety of different types of food that can supply your nutritional needs is a better way to go. To stave off the "binging"(my biggest weight buggaboo) I simply slow down the eating rhythm, put the fork down between bites until the food in the mouth is chewed and swallowed. Let's face it, you know when you eat too much and you know when you don't excercise enough so what become a slave to some statistical program that saps all the joy out of both. I've gone from 183-185 to 167-169 over the past 10 months by doing this. I weighed 170 going into my recent 12 week FM training and was 168.5 the day before the FM.

There is a website The Daily Plate which has free nutrition tracking, as well as a way to record exercise with calories burned and so forth. It has various graphing features also.

USDA has a similar system but it is not so user-friendly as TDP. The Daily Plate has some annoying aspects -- annoying to me! -- but overall is very good. AND FREE.

I think DietPower.com offers a great product. Besides a large "library" of foods in the program, you can enter the nutritional data for the specific foods you eat if they are not in the program library. I believe most folks eat variations of the same basic group of foods. This makes entry very quick ( ie; click, click, click, done !, ) once the data has been entered.

TabbRows wrote:Scott,

Eat moderate portions of food served (you know when there's too much on the plate) and paying attention to make sure you're eating a variety of different types of food that can supply your nutritional needs is a better way to go.

At some level I agree with this, but the problem is that most people don't really know what they're eating and all the nutritional information regarding it. I used to think that I ate healthy and in moderation, yet I crept up to a weight at which I was clearly overweight with a BMI of 27.5. Not huge, but definitely carrying too much weight and I wasn't comfortable with myself.

Using www.TheDailyPlate.com I've been knocking weight off each and every week, I'm down from 186 to 165 and feeling much better. TDP has helped me tremendously because I've never tracked every single thing I ate before (largely because I thought it would have been terribly tedious but their website makes it pretty darned easy especially after you have some history on the site.) Anyway, it has really helped me to understand not just that this is good and that is bad, by looking at the nutritional information of everything I eat I have gained valuable knowledge about specifically how good and bad things are.

While it is certainly helpful from a tracking perspective to have either exact knowledge of what you're eating or have the Nutritional Info for it available, but even when you have to pick a generic items and you still get a very good idea and you can pretty accurately estimate the quantity, especially if you measure out portions occasionally so that you learn portion size based on actual measurements not guesses.

Hi,
I'm pretty new to erging, just started consistently in January at my local Y. But, I'm years and years of struggling hard with weight issues. Since beginning to exercise and eat better in March 2006, I've lost 69 pounds and become much, much healthier and more fit. I still want to lose 12-15 pounds, and have been circling that runway forever. I hope consistent erging will help that.

A little program that has been vitally helpful to me is, "Diet and Exercise Assistant." It helps me to log what I eat, and I have a copy on my PC and the program for my Palm Pilot so that they synch back and forth and I always have my "food journal" with me that way. It comes with a pretty expansive database, and you can add categories, food items, and even create recipes on it then divide into servings. It tracks Calories, Carbs, Protein, Fiber, Fats (both Sat and Unsat). I wish it tracked Cholesterol but it doesn't at this point on v. 7.

What helps me is to simply "set my budget" calories-wise, input my food, and it looks me right in the face with what I'm doing and the choices I'm making. Black and white. It also breaks down your caloric intake into percentage of calories comprised of protein, carbs, and fats, which is helpful to know the balance of your diet. You can also track your exercise and it will give you a calorie-expenditure estimate that's not too far off usually, but I go ahead and input my calories according to my Polar HR Monitor.

I find this program more helpful than online ones because I do carry my PDA everywhere, so it's like having a food journal all the time.

Here's the link for "Diet and Exercise Assistant."
http://www.keyoe.com/

I have checked out the dailyplate.com and it is awesome! Thank you so much for the tip. It is very easy, has indoor rowing listed as an activity and I was up and running in no time. Can't thank you enough!!!