Two Online Helps for Summer Days
Submitted by kim on Fri, 05/25/2012 - 08:57 in Homemaking, Parenting
I'm using two fantastic websites this summer, My Food Diary and Goal For It to help simplify daily life.
My Food Diary
My Food Diary is exactly what it sounds like - an online journal of every bite that goes in my mouth. My Food Diary has an amazing data base of foods, including restaurant menus. In addition, you can manually enter individual food items and entire recipes. By creating a record of what I eat, I am more likely to make good choices all day long.
One feature I love is the color coding My Food Diary uses when you "View Details" of your daily eating. Listing my food choices on the right and calories, fat, protein, etc across the top, the site creates a graph of the nutritional content of every item. Dark green squares = a good choice, light green = sort of good, light red = sort of bad, solid red = bad. When I am diligent to enter what I eat, this screen helps me learn to eat better. Below is the report on this morning's breakfast smoothie. No red! Hooray! Yes, I put spinach in my morning smoothie - just look at all that vitamin A!
Once I enter everything I eat for a given day, My Food Diary offers a report that summarizes my eating. This daily log also makes the consequences of my daily choices real by offering an outlook statement, "If every day were like today, you would weigh _________ in three months." Some days, that can be real sobering.
My Food Diary offers an area to record body measurements, weight and log daily exercise. The more you use the site, the more customized it is to your preferences. The site does charge a monthly user fee. For me, it's worth the $9 because it is helping me learn to eat real food in appropriate quantities. The site encourages me to live a life in balance where being healthy, like watching sodium and exercising, is as high a priority as weight loss.
Goal For It
The second site we are using this summer is Goal For It. Using Goal For It, I have created a chart for Josiah's Super Summer Challenge. I made the chart entering all the activities Josiah can participate in for challenge points, assigned the point value, and designate days open for those activities. When he designates an activity is completed for the day, Goal For It accumulates his points.
Goal For It also offers a reward center, where I entered the rewards and the points needed to redeem each. When Josiah wants to redeem a prize, he selects it, and Goal For It emails me that he has redeemed points.
Goal For It is free and only took me about an hour for initial set up of Josiah's chart.
So excited to have these online resources to make our summer days more productive! Check them out!
