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Finding the Best Diet Tracker for You

By Terry Dunkle*

Which diet tracker should you choose? That depends partly on what you plan to use it for. Is it primarily for weight loss, nutrition—or both? And would you rather have a free diet tracker that sacrifices performance and privacy, or a $20 to $50 model that does a lot more, does it lightning-fast, and protects your diet records from prying eyes?

The two main types of diet trackers these days are:

• Websites. These let you track your calories and a few other nutrients at no charge, but usually force you to look at ads. They also take your email address, which they may rent to other companies who want to sell you supplements, exercise equipment, and such.
  
  
• Software programs. You can buy these from the Web, but they don't operate on the Web—they install on your computer's hard drive. Most are faster, more powerful, and more versatile than website-based programs.

Regardless of the type you choose, here are some things to look for in a diet tracker:

Accuracy in a Diet Tracker

Some diet trackers are notoriously inaccurate—particularly Web-based trackers that allow any user to contribute foods to their database. These trackers make you vulnerable to everyone else's typing errors.

Some also calculate their advice in too-simplistic ways. As a test, see if the calorie budget that your diet tracker gives you matches the one calculated by this tool:

Speed in a Diet Tracker

Nothing is more frustrating than having to wait five or ten seconds every time you ask your diet tracker to find and record a food that you've eaten. Choose a program that can do this in one second or less. (Speed is the Achilles' heel of online diet trackers, especially for users who have a dialup Internet connection instead of cable or DSL.)

Ideally, your diet tracker will display, on the same screen as your food log, a scoreboard showing your calorie intake and expenditures; what percentage of your calories have come from fat, carbohydrate, and protein; and other indicators of your overall nutrition. A diet tracker that doesn't have this feature is like a car without a dashboard.

Versatility in a Diet Tracker

The simplest diet trackers monitor calories only. More sophisticated trackers give you real-time knowledge of not only your macronutrients (fat, carbohydrate, protein, and alcohol), but disease-critical nutrients such as cholesterol and trans fat (important in heart disease), folic acid (birth defects), sodium and potassium (blood pressure), calcium (osteoporosis), and vitamins A, C, E, and selenium (cancer).

If exercise is important to you, choose a diet tracker that also calculates calories burned in physical activity and adds them back into your budget so you can eat more and still reach your goal weight.

Intelligence in a Diet Tracker

All diet trackers describe how your eating affects your weight and nutrition, but a few actually prescribe what to eat or do.

One program, DietPower's Real-Time Eating Coach™, shows which of your favorite foods is best for your overall nutrition right now. To guarantee achieving your goal weight on your deadline, it also adjusts your daily calorie budget to fluctuations in your metabolism and water loss or retention from high sodium intake, warm-weather exercise, or menstruation.

As a minimum, make sure your diet tracker "knows" that a heavier body burns more calories performing the same exercise as a lighter body. That's an indicator that it has a fair degree of built-in intelligence.

Guarantees in a Diet Tracker

Don't spend money on a program that won't issue a no-hassle refund if you return it within 30 days. (DietPower has a one-year, 100-percent refund policy.) Look for a diet tracker that you can try out free for at least a week—preferably two weeks or a month, so you can see how it handles weekend overeating and other cyclical factors.