If you are interested in keeping track of your caloric and/or nutrient intake for the purposes of improving health or losing/gaining weight, I recommend taking CRON-o-meter for a spin. It is free open source software for Windows, Mac, or Linux. You input each item you eat and it tallies all the nutritional data for you. You may find this too tedious to be doing long-term, but I recommend doing it for a few days or a week to see how some of the numbers look, you may be surprised at the results. You can run a report which will show you daily averages. It’s also very informative in that you can see the nutrient breakdowns of various foods, and learn to eat more of certain things if your diet lacks in certain nutrients.
It has a pretty large database of foods, but if you don’t find something, you can also add the food manually. Keep in mind that if the food is not in the database, it may be a sign that you shouldn’t be eating it (i.e. processed crap).
You can also group a set of foods into a custom recipe for ease of adding later (but be aware that if you alter the recipe later it alters it in your previous days also).
You can alter your nutrient goals if you don’t like the predetermined RDA’s for you. (Some RDA’s are BS, as influenced by the meat and dairy industries. For instance the protein and calcium recommendations are too high in my opinion.) It will show you what proportion of your calories come from Protein/Carbs/Fat. You can alter this target ratio. You can track your weight or other parameters on the Biomarkers tab and use it to graph them over time. Remember: to lose a sustainable pound per week of fat, shoot for a daily 500 calorie deficit.
There are on-line solutions for this kind of thing as well, namely fitday.com and nutridiary.com, which I admittedly have not tried. I like CRON-o-meter because it’s light, snappy, simple, powerful. I don’t feel the need for any extra functionality.
Remember it’s best to eat whole fresh ripe raw organic fruits and vegetables, and not rely on supplements. It’s best to avoid refined sugars and starches, processed foods, and dairy.
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