Nutrition Health Center

Exercise Food Journal – Which Is Best?

By Terry Dunkle*

Using an exercise food journal is a smart thing to do if you’re trying to lose weight or improve your athletic conditioning. Decades of scientific study have shown that people who keep records of their meals and physical activity are more successful in their health quests.

Obviously, if you’re going to spend the time required to use an exercise food journal, it pays to get the best journal you can afford. Some are remarkably quick and versatile; others are so tedious and limited that, like a bad exercise machine, they are quickly abandoned.

The advice below applies to exercise food journals that are either installed on your computer or used online. Here are five things to look for when shopping for such a journal.

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Lots of Exercises

The best exercise food journals cover at least 500 different physical activities -- not only sports and traditional exercises (calisthenics, pushups, pull-ups, etc.), but also leisure and hobby activities, as well as occupations.

Lots of Foods

Ignore any journal that covers fewer than 20,000 foods -- and make sure the journal lets you add new foods by entering nutrition facts from their labels. Besides basic foods, the selection should include ethnic and fast foods.

Based on 20 years of research by DietPower, Inc., this calculator is accurate to 5 percent for most users. (It's not for people who are pregnant or have metabolic disorders. Always see a doctor before starting a diet.)

Birth Date

Sex

Tobacco user?

Height

Weight

Goal Weight

Target Date

Email Address

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ft. in.

lbs.

lbs. ?

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Close Goal Weight
Your Goal Weight is the weight you want to achieve. (If it's a lot different from your current weight, you might want to set a goal that represents only the first step. Even a 10-percent weight loss will significantly improve your health.)
Close Target Date
Plan on losing no more than a pound or two per week.  Otherwise, you may eat too little for good nutrition and your weight loss may be temporary.
Close Lactating?
If you are breastfeeding, check this box and the calculator will add calories for producing milk.
Close Tobacco User?
Nicotine speeds your metabolism, making you burn calories faster. (That's why people who quit smoking gain weight.) Check this box if you average more than one cigarette, one-half pipeful, one-quarter of a cigar, or one dip of snuff or chewing tobacco per day.
Close Email Address
Once a month, DietPower will send you the most important nutrition news of the past 30 days, selected by national award-winning editors covering hundreds of medical journals. You can cancel this free, no-obligation service anytime with a single click. We produce it only to promote our weight-loss software. It won't put you on other mailing lists—We're Not That Kind of Company™.

Lots of Nutrients

If your exercise food journal monitors calories only, you’re missing an opportunity to gain deeper insight into your nutrition by watching other nutrients such as fat, protein, carbohydrates, calcium, vitamins, antioxidants such as selenium, and more. Many journals cover two or three dozen nutrients important in lowering your risk of diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, stroke, cancer, and other maladies.

Easy Logging

Logging your meals and exercise shouldn’t take you more than five to ten minutes a day. If it does, your journal is not well designed. To make sure it meets this criterion, take a test drive before buying. If the program doesn’t offer a free trial, try another brand.

Smart Analysis

Most journals give you a calorie budget that assumes you have average metabolism, even though yours may depart from the norm by as much as 30 percent. Most also assume that everyone performing an exercise has the same body weight. For that reason, they won’t correctly calculate the number of calories you burn in an exercise if you weigh more or less than average.

Look for an exercise food journal that not only factors your calorie burn for your body weight, but also monitors your personal metabolic rate by comparing your eating history with your weight change. These are rare, but well worth looking for. (One is DietPower, advertised on this page.)

Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of DietPower, Inc.