Choosing the Right Food Diary

The bigger the database that comes with your food diary, the less time you’ll have to spend entering nutritional data into the computer when you’re adding foods into the database. One program, CalorieKing, claims to include more than 30,000 entries. Most of the programs discussed here have around 20,000 foods in their database, but the content of those 20,000 often varies wildly. Perhaps the way that one of your favorite foods is listed in a particular program bothers you—for example, peaches might be shown as 4” round in one program and small, medium, and large in another.Weight Watchers Online offers a great feature that has pictures of various portion sizes to help you estimate how much you ate. And of course, food scales and measuring cups and spoons are very helpful for enabling you to accurately input the amount of calories you’ve eaten in a day.

To evaluate a program, think about the foods you eat the most, and then search for them in the program’s database. The ease of adding foods and entering them in your food log is also critical, because if it’s difficult, you won’t do it. And, of course, if a program is not easily expandable, don’t use it.

To add foods into the database of any food diary, you need Nutrition Facts information, which is on all packages of food sold in grocery stores (per the USDA). Also called the food label, Nutrition Facts information has changed over the years, getting progressively more detailed over time.