Until recently I knew nothing about healthy eating. Seems like a silly thing to say, but I really didn’t understand how to keep it all straight. I mentioned this to my mom one day, and she told me about a website that you can track your meals through. I tried it out and loved it! I won’t mention that website, though, because about a year after I started doing it they took off their meal-tracking portion …
At any rate, now I use fitday.com. It’s certainly lacking in the bells and whistles department (actually they just redid their site so it is better now!), but I have tried a few and this one is my favorite because you can customize your goals for the day. Here are the goals I have customized:
|
Unit |
Min. Intake |
Max. Intake |
|
|
Calories |
kcals |
1,600.0 |
1,800.0 |
|
Fat |
g |
33.0 |
58.0 |
|
Saturated Fat |
g |
0.0 |
22.0 |
|
Polyunsaturated Fat |
g |
0.0 |
22.0 |
|
Monounsaturated Fat |
g |
25.0 |
33.0 |
|
Cholesterol |
mg |
0.0 |
200.0 |
|
Sodium |
mg |
1,500.0 |
2,300.0 |
|
Potassium |
mg |
3,500.0 |
3,500.0 |
|
Carbohydrate |
g |
169.0 |
244.0 |
|
Dietary Fiber |
g |
25.0 |
35.0 |
|
Protein |
g |
60.0 |
131.0 |
Let me note I am not a nutritionist, nor do I have an expert knowledge of health and fitness. I try to eat around 1,700 calories a day. To set my goals, I did searches online for the amounts of things like sodium, fat, etc. that a person should have in a day. For some of the items, such as polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, I could never find a min. intake – only a maximum. So I don’t actually intend to eat 0g of these fats –as they are “good” fats – I just want to make sure I don’t go over the maximum amount, so that’s what I’m tracking there.
If you are thinking about tracking your meals, I highly recommend it, but here’s a warning: For the first month or so, this will be a huge pain. You have to enter in manually everything you eat. You also have to measure everything you eat. I promise you, if you stick with it for one month, it will get easier. We tend to eat the same things over and over – and you will build up a base for what you are eating regularly and you won’t have to enter it more than once.
This will make you not want to eat out as much though! I had a reality check early into the process one night when I ordered fajitas at Chilis. I ate half of them, got a box for the rest, went home and looked up the nutrition info online. I was appalled – those fajitas had twice the amount of sodium that a person needs in one day!! It was terrible. I threw the rest away.
By no means do I make healthy choices all the time. But I will say it’s been helpful being aware of what I am putting in my mouth – if I’m going to go out to eat, I want to make sure I’m eating healthy the rest of the week!