Primarily I hate the setup that assume you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and one snack. I end up with double in breakfast and double in lunch to cover 4 of my meals and then dinner on its own and snack for meal #6.
Tonight I tried out another free site called Mikibo.
Pros:*You can put food in for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and dessert.
*It doesn't take the exercise calories off the food calories total
*There is room for notes on the exercise page so you can record what you did and weights lifted
*It calculates total energy expenditure including work, exercise and just being alive
*It has quick add which means you can add food you use all the time
*It monitors iron and saturated fats on the main page
*You can put your daily weight in
*It doesn't seem to have the patronising tone of CK
*It has cool graphs and charts
*It tracks everything over a week as well as daily
*It estimates my maintenance calories at 2,044 a day :)
Cons:
*It is a US database that is fairly generic. Don't expect to find Australian brands listed. In one way it is better because instead of worrying about what brand and flavour of yogurt you are eating today, it just has a couple to choose from. I have to refer back to CK for actual calories to find the appropriate product but I expect it will get easier as time goes on.
*It doesn't subtotal meals so you don't know if you balanced your macros per meal, only per day. For Miss K OCD this is probably an improvement.
*The daily screen only shows one thing at a time - calories, or fat, or protein, not all at once.
It is worth a look but because it doesn't have all your CK favourites and custom foods entered, it will take a bit longer to get things in. If you don't have patience you will probably not bother and go back to CK (especially if you primarily use the food log). But if you want a more integrated program that is a bit of a change, then try it out. I can also link/embed things in my blog so once I have a week's worth of data I'll see how it works.
You gotta find the tools that suit you. Personally, I like the macros-per-meal feature in Cal King (you can change the settings to remove that, BTW), and I don't care about the one section for snacks. I've also set up a lot of my favourite meals, so one click puts them in instead of farting around finding all the ingredients every time.
ReplyDeleteThe linking/embedding feature is cool....
Katie have you ever had a look at fitday.com?
ReplyDeleteIt has the same pretty graphs etc... I haven't been there for ages but thats what I used in 2002 when I lost my weight. It also allows you to keep your own custom database which is what I did. Always remember being American their carb counts are different to Australian in that the US includes fibre into their counts but thats what CK did for all their fresh foods anyway which just made CK inconsistent and confusing!
with Calorie king, if you go into the menu at the top "View" then "layout" then click on "snack after each meal" it will then put in 6 meals for you. Thats how I have mine set up.
ReplyDeleteHope that helps!!!
Katie - I've been meaning to post about this for ages. The desktop version of CK is heaps better than the web based one. Mine is set up for three meals three snacks, you can display any nutrient/macro you want for any food item (eg sodium, fat, sat fat, fibre) and you can display as many of them as you wish, or change at will. The only thing I don't like is the way it deducts the exercise cals from nutritional cals. And it produces heaps of reports. Mine is also set up to publish to CK website every time I close it.
ReplyDeleteOh and thanks for the email -I'm just really busy -will get back to you soon - but never too busy to read your blog!
Oh and I forgot to say - you can enter your daily weight - have been doing so for 1.5 years and add notes, and produce reports over any time period you like! And you can trial it free for 7 days - then just pay a once off fee for a permanent registration.
ReplyDeleteI also have CK set up for a total of 6 meals per day. You can add your weight daily also.
ReplyDeleteI can't find the layout thing or daily weigh in - am I right in assuming it is only in the desktop version and not the free online web version?
ReplyDelete