Food & Exercise Journal Software
Every year, one of the top New Year’s resolutions reported is to lose weight, and with good reason. Obesity is officially a problem in developed nations and is still on the rise. The solution is well known–eat right, exercise more–but if it is so simple, why doesn’t everyone do it?
Sometimes it can be as simple as underestimating food consumption and overestimating exercise. By balancing food intake and exercise, losing weight can be accomplished more easily with the help of food and exercise journal software.
Types
Food and exercise journal software can be either web-based, like Livestrong’s Daily Plate, or downloaded onto a computer’s hard drive like FitDay PC.
Web-based journal software tends to be more flexible as it can continue to add common foods to the nutrition database and offer support. Computer-loaded software usually offers more functions and does not require connection to the Internet to log information.
Food Function
Each type of software allows easy food intake tracking which will tally calories, carbohydrates, protein and sometimes vitamins and minerals.
Some programs like Livestrong’s My Plate even have common restaurants and fast food nutritional information stored so the user only needs to type in the name of the meal and restaurant to log it as consumed food. If a food is not in the database, ingredients can be combined to calculate the necessary nutritional values.
Exercise Function
These programs also allow easy recording of training. Entering workouts in the exercise journal software will calculate the calories burned in each session and record them. Both FitDay and My Plate, as well as many others, often even calculate this based upon the weight last entered, as people of different sizes burn calories at different rates.
Convenience
The greatest benefit of food and exercise journal software is the convenience. Everything is stored in one place. All the math–nutritional values and caloric burn–is already done; it just needs to be entered for the day. Weight loss progress can be tracked easily. Since most people are on the computer at least once a day, the journal software is at the ready for logging all information.
Expert Insight
A study performed by Jack Hollis, Ph.D. published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in August 2008 found that those participants who kept a food journal lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The study also had the participants report how many minutes of exercise were performed, which they concluded assisted in the success of the project through “behavioral intervention.”
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