Background:
Back in March 2008, I had been in a weight-loss plateau for three months, weighing in at 193 pounds and having a body fat percentage of 15%. Despite my intense exercise routine, I was not able to lose the desired remaining weight consistently; however, my body fat percentage was also decreasing slowly. I suspected that I had been eating too many calories for weight loss, and was simply maintaining my weight. I knew that if I wanted to go below 10% body fat, I could lose about 20 more pounds.

Results Summary:
I started using MyFoodDiary.com (MFD) on March 31, 2008 and reached my goal of 175 pounds and under 10% body fat on August 6, 2008.

What is it?:
MyFoodDiary.com is a web-based calorie counter and exercise log designed to be used as part of a weight management program. Most users of this online service use it to assist with weight loss. The site tracks calorie intake (diet) and calorie expenditure (exercise). Then based on the user’s physical statistics and goals, it calculates how many calories must be consumed and/or burned to either lose one to two pounds per week, maintain weight, or gain weight. Users can monitor on a daily basis two factors involved in weight management: food intake vs exercise. MyFoodDiary.com supports the basic weight loss premise that one must consume less calories than the calories expended. For example, in order to lose one pound per week, one should create a calorie deficit of 500 calories/day. Over the course of seven days, the deficit would be 3,500 calories, which is approximately equal to one pound of weight loss. You can watch a video overview here.

Target audience (Who is it for?):
MyFoodDiary.com is best suited for the disciplined person. Ideal users are those who are willing to record what they eat on a daily basis (using the site’s online database of over 50,000 food items), record nutritional information for the foods not in the database, and record calories burned through activity and exercise. Users should be goal-oriented, motivated, determined, and persistent. The service is best applied by those who want to change to a healthy, active lifestyle. I would not recommend this service to people looking for a quick fix to their weight problems or those who just want to change their diet without exercise because losing weight in a healthy way is not just about food or “starving yourself”. Additionally, I believe the service works best in conjunction with the use of a heart rate monitor during exercise to monitor the exact number of calories burned.

Overview of how it works:

1. Set goals.
2. Record food intake daily.
3. Record exercise activities daily.
4. Generate daily summary and/or reports on personal progress.
5. Adjust food intake and/or exercise activity levels to reach goals.

Setting goals

Within the My Account tab there are three steps to establishing goals.

1. Enter personal information into the My Body section. MFD needs to know your gender and age so that it can calculate your daily allowance of calories.
   

   My Body >> Stats, Measurements & Age

2. Enter information about the activity level in your current lifestyle into the Lifestyle section. Agai, MFD uses this to calculate your daily calorie allowance, using information about your activity level to predict your allowable intake.
   

   Lifestyle >> Activity Level & Habits

3. Set your weight goal and optional water consumption goal into the My Goals section. MFD allows you to choose from a list of weekly weight change targets from a convenient drop-down menu.
   

   My Goals >> Set Personal Targets

Recording daily food intake

The main tab, Food Diary, contains three ways to enter information about your food consumption plus a searchable, online food database of over 50,000 food items. You can also search for foods that you have entered yourself.

Food Diary >> The Fridge, Manual Food Entry, Recipe Builder

First, you search for your food item in the database. It’s fairly extensive, and a pretty powerful search engine in its own right. So you should just use a few key words when searching. For example, suppose you’re looking for Niblets Corn & Butter Sauce by Green Giant. If you search for green giant, the result will return all the food items in the database containing Green Giant, which produces an unwieldy list of 25 items, four pages long. But if you narrow the search to just the keyword niblets, the search result returns only two items.

Searchable food database

After the search, you can:

• Add the food item to your e-fridge
• Specify the quantity of the food
• Specify for which meal of the day you ate the food item

If the food item is not contained in the database, you can enter the item manually, using Manual Food Entry. All you need is the nutritional information to store the food in your own database and/or e-fridge.

Manual Food Entry >> Add NewFood

Finally, you can also add your own recipes to your own database and/or e-fridge with the built-in RecipeBuilder. The recipe builder allows you to create custom meals and specify the meal by how many servings you consume. It calculates how many calories the serving is worth based on caloric value of all the ingredients in the recipe.

Recipe Builder

**** Read the Conclusion of this review. ****