Online Diet and Exercise Tracking Tools

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?

• We Endure

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.

• The Hacker’s Diet Tracker

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.”