FitDay.com

As I seek new ways to motivate myself to get leaner and more healthy, I've been using the website FitDay. It's pretty cool. You enter in your activities and foods for the day, and it spits charts and percentages back at you. For example, yesterday I consumed 2409 calories. That sounds pretty good for someone quite a few pounds north of 200 lbs, but then I look closer at my numbers - 41% of my calories came in the form of carbs (who knew yogurt was so carbtacular?), with a respectable 25% coming from protein and 23% coming from fat. I'm pretty anti-low carb diet, but I also strive to be a bit more balanced than I was yesterday. However, my 40 minutes on the eliptical and 30 minutes weighttraining burned over 1000 calories, so that, combined with the amount of calories my moderately active job and lifestyle burns throughout the day, I burned about 1500 more calories than I ate yesterday.

The website appeals to the obsessive dorkiness that propels most of my successful endeavors.

It's not a perfect site. I wish their Activities section was more detailed. The machines at the gym take into account my heartrate and tell me my calories burned, and they always end up much more than the estimates that the website (which doesn't ask for heartrate) comes up with. But it's pretty cool site, making me think of fitness more as a science than anything else. I've stuck with it for weeks at a time back when I lived fitness day in and day out. I wouldn't write down what I ate all day, but I'd sit down at the end of the day and run through my list, often running into the kitchen to enter information from labels. Today, for example, I saved the wrapper and label from my meal replacement post-workout breakfast bar, and just entered it in.

I hope I can keep this up for a while. I'm feeling pretty good right now and want to keep it up.