Use Fitday to track calories eaten and burned

FitDay is a totally free service that lets you enter everything you’ve eaten and everything you’ve done all day. If you’re working out and eating well, and still not losing like you should be, this could help you find the problem. You plug in every item you eat (many of which are already there) and plug in every activity you do – even showering burns a few calories, and FitDay gives you an idea how many.

It’s important to note that the basic theory – that you must burn more calories per day than you consume to lose weight – is fairly sound*, but the site can’t do everything for you. For example, it records your weight to make a more accurate measurement of the calories burned – and that should be pretty accurate. But if someone very tall walks at 3mph, that’s going to be less vigorous movement than the same speed is for someone very short. I’m quite short, and can’t even walk 3.5 mph – I have to jog to do that speed. To get FitDay to cough up the same number of burned calories that the elliptical machines at the gym do when I do 45 minutes at 3.5 – 4.0 mph, I have to put “Running, 5.0 mph” into FitDay. And then it’s a tiny bit over, so I deduct a couple of minutes.

So it doesn’t eliminate all the guesswork. But it does seem to use reasonable estimates. You can also customize foods if you know the exact nutritional value of what you’ve eaten and it’s not identical to the version the site has. I wish you could customize activities a bit, but again, that’s where the guesswork comes in, if you want to be highly accurate.

Yesterday I ate lighter than usual, and according to FitDay I still consumed about 400 more calories than I burned. And yet I weighed a pound less this morning than yesterday morning. This can work the opposite for me – have a very active day, forget to eat more than a healthy snack, and put on weight. So I don’t care what anyone says: the human metabolism is not quite as simple as “calories in, calories out”. Still, FitDay is a good tool to have in your arsenal as you try to figure out what works for your body.

Related posts: