Before long, there will be a new diet scheme for every overweight person on the planet. No matter what your chosen tack towards thinness, you’ll find that keeping track of your calorie intake, weight, and workout frequency will help keep your eye on the goal.
You did set a goal, right?
• One of several Web 2.0-y training sites, We Endure is oriented around exercise, not dieting. By tracking your performance in “endurance sports” like cycling and swimming, then comparing and discussing your results with others doing the same, We Endure hopes to encourage you to greater result. There are public-facing user pages with RSS feeds, should you want to share you performance with someone that isn’t a We Endure member.
We Endure also has listings and in-site sign-ups for events like marathons and bike tours, serving a little like an Uncoming.org for athletes. Oh, and it’s free.
• Fit Day
Fit Day is an old stand-by in the online weight-loss tracking world; While it’s updated from time to time, its features are sometimes lacking. For instance, if a food and its caloric and health values are not listed in Fit Day’s database, you can add the values for the new item and save them for future use. Yet, you can’t share that data with others to use in their personal Fit Day tracker. (That would be very handy for couples or roommates.)
As a site for solo tracking, though, Fit Day is pretty great, with weight, nutrition, fitness, and calorie tracking, an optional public-facing journal, and a generally well-rounded set of graphs and charts generated from the data you enter. Oh, and it’s free.
• Traineo
Now we’re talking Web 2.0—they even have a reflectived logo and gradients!
Traineo’s hallmark feature are “motivators,” four friends and family of your choosing who receive reports—they aren’t spam!—of your progress, knitting a web of shame into which you’ll hopefully never fall.
If I sound pessimistic I don’t mean to be: The site has a lot of personality and polish. I take a special shine to the social features: Working towards goals with others doing the same is a powerful tonic.
If you’re a proponent of The Hacker’s Diet (which, again, isn’t really a diet, but a set of tools that can be used with nearly any other diet) and you’re not keen on using Excel or one of the other offline tools provided, this free web-based tool will let you keep your data and generate the long-term chart that forms the center of The Hacker’s Diet’s “Eat Watch.”
14 Responses to “Online Diet and Exercise Tracking Tools”
- 1 Trackback on Oct 19th, 2006 at 5:18 am
My main problem with FitDay is a usability one: once you’ve added a food, you can’t search for it the same way you search for every other food. There’s the official food pile, and your own personal food ghetto, and they aren’t treated the same.
I’m using Daily Plate now, which does have things like food sharing and excercise tracking. And i shouldn’t say I’m using it, because I’m having a food journaling lapse right now.
http://www.thedailyplate.com/
This is great. I have been looking for an online diet tracker for a while that doesn’t cost $20 a month. I think between this week’s theme, and the cooking week, Dethroner has made me actually want to change some stuff in my life. I know this sounds like a total kiss-up BS comment, but it is true. Good jeorb, Joel.
You forgot about http://trackstat.us - my site :)
I wrote most of it in a weekend, and it’s dead simple to use.
While FitDay doesn’t have food sharing of it’s own, there is a site which helps with this dilemma. I find FitDay’s database to be horribly small, to the point that you need to add everything. However, I found http://dietfacts.com which has within it a button on every food which is filled out to FitDay’s standards: “Add to FitDay”. This helps a TON with the food entry, since DietFacts has almost everything I can think of. Still not sharing, but it takes the hassle-factor of FitDay entry down by a ton.
Another good one: fitnessjournal.org
When I was doing my own weight loss routine, i found the site MyBodyComp.com to be very useful. You feed it stats (your age, height, weight, measurements across your body) and it pumps out a report including your bodyfat composition, hips-waist ratio, and a chart showing what parts of your body could use a bit more muscle.
What’s better is you could compare older reports to new ones and see how you’ve been doing–it was an amazing motivator for me. I particularly liked that it tracked bodyfat percentage. I was weight-training on top of the nutrition so my weight was a terrible indicator–muscle weighs more than fat. I think they’ve changed their name since, but it appears to still be free, and the domain-name still resolves:
http://www.mybodycomp.com
…i know, you’re already on a different theme–but maybe the site will still be useful to you.
If you like community based training:
check out gimme20.com
free as in beer
Enjoy !
I don’t see Gym Journal anywhere.
Gym Journal is a free online workout journal that allows you to store and analyze your weight lifting workouts, cardio activities, physique, and diet.
Another site is HealtheHuman.com, which lets you create and track your workout along with diet, and supplements. It also has some cool features to tracking body measurements to see your progress.
Another one to consider that will be launching by the end of the summer is http://www.gotalkfitness.com. This site will encompass both social networking and fitness and nutrition tracking. You will be able to create a workout program online and then see your results laid out on a graph. This site will also allow you to find out who is working out at different gyms and interact with them as well.
Check us out, the site will be free and you can register for our free newsletter. Join the mailing list at http://www.gotlakfitness.com.
hi,
you may also want to check out BodyDaemon:
http://www.bodydaemon.com
thanks,
jim
I was hoping that there would be an Excel template that was suitable for tracking meals etc. It can’t be that hard to make, but my skills with Excel are certainly very poor!
i like we endure…i personally use it