This week I’ve become enamored with diet/fitness related websites. For a while I’ve been using Traineo to track how often I’ve been exercising. I’ve been pretty happy with the options available for exercise. It’s nothing too fancy, you simply enter in the type of activity, how “hard” it was and how many minutes you exercised. You can enter up to three exercises per day.

However, Traineo also has a “diet” section where users track how many calories they eat each day. The problem with this section is it requires the user to know how many calories they eat each day. Usually I don’t have a clue. Sure, they link to the USDA Food Database but that’s next to useless when you cook. After all, how would it know how many calories are in my variation of Cuban Black Beans?

Tuesday, I ran across a question on Lifehacker about how to get fit/lose weight. I briefly scanned the comments and someone mentioned that they use FitDay to track their fitness level.

I don’t like FitDay’s exercise log nearly as much as I like Traineo’s log. For example, I couldn’t find any category matching pilates (though I could just be missing it). However, their diet tool was much better than Traineo’s. It lets me search for specific foods and then add them to the “Today’s Food” section. Then it has a spiffy looking pie chart that shows what percentage of your food was carbs, fat and protein. This was much more detailed than Traineo’s offering. Yet, FitDay (at least the web version) still didn’t have a good interface for evaluating recipes.

After wandering around the web a bit I found Nutrition Data. The site feels . . . weird. I can’t quite figure out why it exists. It’s obviously ad supported but I’m not convinced anyone is making much money from it. The interface is also a little odd. You can search for food and add it to your “pantry.” The items in your pantry are stored in a cookie on your computer. Naturally, this makes keeping your data a little trickier than normal. I don’t understand why they don’t have user accounts. I almost expected there to be an option to buy a more advanced version of the software (like FitDay does) but there isn’t.

While the interface of Nutrition Data is a bit odd, I really like some of the options. I can add items from their database or create my own items. After I’ve added items to my pantry I can group them into recipes. However, the really fun part comes when you “analyze” an item or recipe. Then Nutrition Data spits out fun little charts that show:

• A Caloric Ratio Pyramid
• Nutrient Balance Indicator
• Nutritional Target Map
• Protien Quality Indicator
• Estimated Glycemic Load

So, for the past couple of days I’ve been using portions of all three websites mentioned above to track my exercise and diet. I strongly suspect that I’ve been doing this more because it appeals to my inner spreadsheet than because I actually care this much about what I’m eating. However, it’s fairly harmless and cheap entertainment