Monday, June 29, 2009

Potbellys = 141.8% of my daily protein!

My coworker introduced me to a slick web application for tracking daily food intake. MyPlate is part of the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong website. The application works off of user-generated content. Anyone can enter in the nutritional value for any food. This creates a huge database of foods that you can then search for the specific food you've eaten that day. It gets quite specific: 2% milk from Kroger, Kashi Pumpkin Spice Granola Bar, raw blueberries.


[Screenshot of website]

After putting in your food, it will calculate your nutrition intake, by day, week, month. I was pretty cheery when entering in my oatmeal and strawberry breakfast, but not so much with the PotBelly Big Turkey Sandwich for lunch, where my protein shot up to 141.8% daily value and sodium to 120.6%.

There are a few other nifty features, like being able to save a meal (e.g. cereal, milk & blueberries together as "breakfast" rather than entering each item in separately) or writing how your body feels each day.

I've always wondered how many calories I really consume each day. That, along with a growing suspicion that my body is not digesting dairy as well as it used to, will (hopefully) motivate me to use this for a few weeks.

Results forthcoming.

4 comments:

Sherry said...

I've used FitDay.com, and I think it is pretty cool. I need to get back in the habit, and I would LOVE to get Eric in the habit too.

Jen said...

Those websites are cool, I haven't looked at the Lance site but I've used sparkpeople which sounds like about the same thing. I think what would be interesting for me is if at the end of the day, everything I ate during the day was piled on the table. (that sentence most likely has some grammatical error... oh well) I'm such a snacker.

Dawn said...

good idea...I'll go check these sites! I think I'd die of embarrasement if all the food I ate was piled on the table at the end of the day. Would make an impact though.

Weezie said...

Baron, I think it is time to join the ranks with mom and I in consuming... yep, lactose free milk. It's still milk, not like gagging down soy milk, so you can drink a full glass of it every day but your tummy is much happier. (I have also found that a little chocolate soy milk mixed with lactose free milk gives you the taste of milk without the watery soyness of silk.)