The calorie counter

Been trying to get a lot better at tracking my calories. I feel like I do pretty good during the week and stay below my recommended 1900ish calories. However, the weekends tend to do me in.

We often end up eating with friends or family and I find it hard (and someone intrusive) to sit and try and figure out everything that’s going into the food I’m eating. Even harder when we do potluck for our community group each Saturday. Suffice to say, I usually track all I can on the weekend and then tag an extra 2-3k calories on top of that.

livestrong calories 04/21/09

It’s really amazing to see how many calories you ingest day to day. For example, my huge salad from Chili’s last night was 850 calories where as the roast beef sandwich I was given for lunch from Corner Bakery weighed in at 1000 calories. I did however check the Corner Bakery and saw that it reported the calories at 790. So of course I submitted the changes to Livestrong.com.

Either way – I would have to say I’m eating less as well as smarter now that I realize how quickly those calories add up (of course I guess the real judge is the scale and Laurie :-)).

Livestrong.com

Found Livestrong.com today thanks to the brand new BlackBerry App Store.

Very cool!

The site has lots of great hints/pointers for living healthier and tracks your food/caloric intake throughout the day as well as what you burn with exercising. I was surprised at just how many nutritional facts could be found for various foods on the site. Things like Costco’s brand foods, a random can of green beans, various food from restaurants etc., etc. In addition to the basic tracking, the site itself has loads of free tools and offers additional tools with a paid subscription.

Add to that the BlackBerry or (iPhone) app and you’ve got one amazingly powerful tool.

Speaking of, here’s a chart of my day one intake…

livestrong

That yellow slice of the pie, 45% of my caloric intake for the day, is literally a slice of pie! One slice of pizza pie that is – 776 calories!

Good thing I avoided the Sausage Egg and Cheese Biscuit from Whataburger this morning. Saw that it was 663 calories before I left home this morning. Add 200 calories from the hash browns that come in a combo meal and you’ve got half your day’s recommended calories. I opted for the Bacon and Egg Taquito (387 calories) instead.

But looking at what you’re eating in a visual manner like this is sure to be handy.

What have you found to help you?