Our Back Porch: Very COOL FREE Nutrition/Diet Tracker online! Check it out!!

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half sorrow.
A Swedish Proverb

Very COOL FREE Nutrition/Diet Tracker online! Check it out!!

Posted by MN~Sue on 4/5/2005, 3:25 pm

Hi Friends,
I just discovered this great tracker online. It is free to use. It is on the ediets site. I will link to the tracker sign-up page below. You enter your food intake and it does all the calculations for you! It gives you carbs, fat, calories, cholesterol, sodium, etc. and all the nutrition info. It tallies for it each meal/snack entered and also gives you a summary of your daily totals, telling you if you are in the normal range, lacking, or exceeding it and gives you a pointer on how to correct it and its importance. VERY COOL!
You may not find the exact item you ate in all instances, but you can come close. If you don't find it listed, you can do a search on it and it may come up or you may have to choose something similiar. For example, chicken leg was not in the list, I searched it and it came up and I added it to the list. I was looking for sauted onions (using no grease) and drew a blank on that one entirely, so had to choose boiled onions, since mine were cooked and now raw. Otherwise, everything else I entered was on their list.
Just to give you an example, here is what I ate yesterday (the way I entered it on the tracker):
First meal (my breakfast, even though it doesn't look like breakfast food, haha):
Cat fish, baked or broiled (Terry BBQ it the night before, this was leftovers) .5 filet
Pear medium
you enter serving size
[it gives calories, carbs, sodium, protein, fat for each entry]
Snack:
Chicken leg, 1 piece (left over from BBQ 2 nights ago, haha, lots of BBQing and left-overs)
1 small strawberry
Dinner:
Beef patty, char-broiled, frozen, 4oz (best choice available, Terry BBQ hamburgers)
Hamburger bun, whole-wheat, 1
Casup, 1 Tbsp
Onions boiled, no salt, 1/2 cup (as noted above, I sauted them in a non-stick pan with no grease)
Peas, canned, 1/2 cup
*************
My Daily Totals:
Calories: 956.3
Fats: 44.4
Sodium: 915.7 (this was probably more as it didn't acocunt for salt added to food)
Protein: 64.1
Carbs: 78.3
My daily SUMMARY said I was low on fiber. This is a difficult one for me, now with having to eat so few carbs due to diabetes. This was sure helpful to see though. I think I will need to get it by eating a leafy salad with low carb veggies once a day.
I am also low on almost all vitamins and minerals BUT, I guess I have to expect that when only eating about 1,000 calories a day. I guess I should look into supplements.
I wanted to increase my calcium, but that is also hard with limiting carbs I didn't realize milk was so high in carbs until I started having to count them! I had only consumed 146 mg of calcium and the daily RDA is no less than a 1,000. My doc wanted me to supplement with 1,200. HOWEVER, in addition to the 146 I ate, I took one calcium chew with dinner that would have brought me up to 646. There is no way I can get in 3 chews a day with taking thyroid med. One has to space calcium at least 4 hours apart from thyroid medication and the chews have to be taken with a meal. I am only eating 2 meals a day, so that leaves only one chew a day. The two times I tried taking a chew with a snack, I got sick from it. The dietician said calcium can do that - so I apparantly need to take it with more food than my snacks are allowing me. Maybe I will have to find a way to change that.
The only vitamins and minerals that I didn't fall below the normal range were:
Vit. C, 159.6 - RDA for women is 75
Folic Acid, 98.4 - RDA .4
Vit B12, 5 - RDA 2.4
I was low in:
Calcium, Iron, Vit A, Vit D, Vit E, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vit B6, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Zinc, Copper
Hopefully, once I reach my desired weight, I can start to add more calories to try to get in more of the vitamins and minerals I need, but I will still have the problem of needing to eat low carb. It sure gets complicated, if not impossible, haha.
Not to mention there are SOOOO many differing opinions about how diabetics should eat. On message boards, many do not agree with the ADA's recommendation for eating carbs and feel you can't eat them. The dietician I saw follows the ADA guidelines, of course, so that is what I have been following. Right now, my head feels like it is caught in a whrilwind of conflicting info!!!!!
Back to my meals I listed above and this tracker info: I was well within the daily carb restrictions set by the dietician (135 g. a day). My dinner exceeded the daily meal allowance (45 g) by 5 g.
Also, I measure amounts in measuring cups to be sure I am accurate with my serving sizes. I am just doing this until I become familiar enough with each item over time to be able to eyeball it
Hope you get to check this tracker out, it's so cool and can really give you an idea of where you can make improvements in your diet and give you an accurate assessment of calories, carbs, fats, protein, and sodium you are eating.
Good Luck! Eat Healthy, Get Exercise!
Love,
Sue