have a fit day!

by Kathleen Moore, Ph.D.

Have you discovered FitDay.com yet? FitDay isn’t a diet site. It doesn’t tell you what or what not to eat. It’s a tool for keeping track of your diet and daily activities, no matter what your goals. It’s a terrifically useful site. And it’s free! FitDay has been in existence for over 5 years and has 1.3 million users.

The main component of FitDay is a food diary that calculates the protein, fat, carbs, and calories of everything you eat each day. You can choose from thousands of foods in their database, or enter your own custom foods. From your height, weight, and activity level FitDay calculates how many calories you should eat. And when you enter your activities for the day, it will tell you how many calories you expended. You can also determine whether you’re meeting your daily nutrient requirements from the foods you eat. By setting personal fitness, weight, or nutrition goals, you can track your progress over a year’s time.

FitDay is a sophisticated set of tools to help manage all aspects of your diet and fitness. Journaling you r foods and activities is a proven way to increase success with a weight loss or exercise program, and FitDay provides a central location where you can track the foods you eat and exercises you do each day.

In the FitDay Food Journal, you enter the foods you eat and get a breakdown of calories, fat, carbs, and protein for each food and totals for the day. In the Activity Journal, you log your activities, get a count of calories burned for each activity and a daily breakdown of your metabolic expenditure based on height and weight. And in the Weight Tracking section, you can view your weight plotted on a chart of healthy weight ranges, set a goal weight and deadline, and see a daily progress report toward your goal.

FitDay also contains an extensive Reports and Analysis section providing a number of detailed reports on your nutrition and fitness. FitDay helps analyze your diet, exercise, and weight, generating graphical reports to answer critical fitness questions. And because FitDay stores your past entries for at least 3 years, you can perform a long term analysis of your diet and exercise. Each report contains a description of what is being tracked, and easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Reports include Calories Eaten, Nutrition, Weight Change, Activity Progress, Calories Burned, Custom Nutrition Goals, and Calories Eaten/Burned.

FitDay was launched in 2000, and its growth has been due almost entirely to word of mouth. FitDay currently has around 1.5 million members. Each member creates a private, personalized account on the FitDay site. The site contains no advertising, no pop-ups, nothing to distract you from what you’re doing. Jim Determan, one of the founders of FitDay, told us that they do not need any advertising or outside sponsorship. Sales of a PC version of FitDay, launched in January of 2004, are currently sufficient to support the free website. Says Determan, “This is great, as we are very proud to offer the free site for everyone to use.”

We have included a link to the FitDay site on the “Fitness Tools” section of the RHL website (www.rochesterhealthyliving. com). And while you’re there, check out our other fitness tools, a set of online calculators to help you monitor other important aspects of your health and exercise such as pace, target heart rate, caloric needs, nutritional needs, ideal weight, body fat, and calorie-burning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kathleen Moore has a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, and works as an administrator at the University of Rochester. Contact her at kmoore@rochesterhealthyliving.com.