Fitday.com - ThinnerTimes

Hawaiianese Girl · 06-04-2008, 06:33 AM

Hello all!
I'm just now getting on the fitday.com bandwagon and I'm not familiar with how to add food. For example, I had lactaid skim milk and a vanilla unjury protein shake this morning. So, I found something that was close to what I think my skim milk is, but as far as the protein powder goes, what I found wasn't the same as my unjury. I put in protein powder and found one that I thought would work, but when it put it up on my chart, it showed 32g of protein but the unjury is only 23, I believe. Also, what if I only eat 4 cheese nips? How do I account for that? So will I have to do the "custom add" most of the time to make sure everything is accurate? How do I enter the vitamins I take or should I not bother with that?
Tips please!

Thanks,
Mahealani

mistymee · 06-04-2008, 07:53 AM

I no longer use the free version of fitday, but I have in the past. (I use the $20 paid version which is a quite a bit easier to use)..

But the answer to your question is, yes, to be accurate, you want to add the foods you eat regularly to the custom foods section. You only need to add them to their database once, and they'll still be there the next time you want to log them so though it's a bit of a hassle to start, it gets easier.

As for vitamins, I did add mine as they were different than anything they had in their database. It helps just to be able to track whether I actually took my vitamins or not for the day.

I also track my fluid intake (I don't recall if that is an option in the free version or not)... but for custom foods, I have ice: 1 ounce per cube, SF Popsicles which are 1.7 fluid ounces (not the 2 fl ounces someone else posted don the board, if they are the Popsicle brand .. if you eat enough of them, that .3 ounces can make a difference, LOL)

Hope that helps some..

Hawaiianese Girl · 06-04-2008, 08:05 AM

Thank you so much, mistymee! It helps a great deal.

OsoDelDesierto · 06-04-2008, 08:15 AM

Mahealani, I use the "Add Custom Foods" feature a lot - I find that with the free FitDay.com, there are a lot of foods I eat (Syntrax Nectar powder, Worldwide Pure Protein shakes, Fage yogurt, Trader Joe's light string cheese, etc.) for which I need to input specific nutrition details, but once they're in my database, I can go into "Recent Foods" or "Custom Foods" to bring them up easily. Other foods (chicken breast, for example) I just put into my daily log using the basic nutrition info from the website.

As far as portion sizes go, there are pulldown menus for different serving sizes (cup, oz., tablespoon, etc.) for each item. I just put the generic info or custom food info values (with the basic serving size information from the nutrition label) into the daily log and then change the serving size for my actual use, if I've used 1.5 scoops of protein powder instead of one scoop or .5 cups of Fage yogurt instead of one cup...

You can create a custom food entry for your multivitamin using the info on the nutrition label and then just add that custom food to your daily intake record. I'm not sure if the "Add Custom Food" feature will have every nutrient listed that your multivitamin contains. There is also a way to create custom nutrition goals and check how you're doing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis...

Hawaiianese Girl · 06-04-2008, 09:59 AM

Wow, thank you so much for all that info, Eric! I'm taking notes..lol

~M~

Hawaiianese Girl · 06-04-2008, 03:06 PM

Hello again,
Well I'm having fun entering food into my daily food intake section but I'm noticing that they don't have "sugar" listed when you do a custom add. What do you do about that? Also, I'm at 665 calories already and that's without listing sugar. I'm 2.5 months out and I'm not sure how many calories I should be intaking. My carbs are at 51 and protein at 58. 60 is the daily goal for protein, right? These numbers are about to be a little higher because I have a few more things to enter AND I haven't even had dinner yet. I'm feeling bad that I'm eating too many calories. Please let me know.
Thanks,
M

Hawaiianese Girl · 06-04-2008, 03:54 PM

Ok, a few more questions....

1.) Is "Folate" the same as Folic Acid?
2.) I tried to put my vitamins in the "custom add" section but when it came to me having to put a number in for serving size, I was stumped. What is one tablet of B12 equal to? One gram? And the same for my multivitamin...not sure what to put in for serving size when you're trying to enter a tablet.

Thanks!
M

fisher1000 · 06-04-2008, 04:18 PM

Okay...I went to Fitday and tried to figure this out. I'm posting what I put in for my Multivitamin. I supplement with additional stuff, but this is for my main Centrum Performance that I take daily. It wouldn't let me put in every single component, but enough that I could track the main things I'm taking in--that way it also shows deficiencies when you run reports, letting you adjust what supplements you might need to add. Just keep in mind that as GBS patients, we need much more than the regular daily dose of some vitamins for increased absorption. Search for vitamins above and look for posts by MiladyBeth--she's posted some good info about vitamins over the last few months.

Also--folate and folic acid are the same, so you can type them in as such when you record it.

Hope this helps!

-Mike

mistymee · 06-04-2008, 04:30 PM

fitday doesn't track sugar totals for the day which can be a huge problem..

As long as you enter the calories for whatever item you're eating, based on the nutrition labels, whether it tracks sugars or not shouldn't cause a problem

For protein, I think at your stage, 60 was the minimum total I was supposed to get.. and my nut had me at 600 to 800 calories as a goal.

One final note.. when I was early out, eating too few calories caused me to stall on weight loss. You'll feel much better if you get in all your proteins in.. I'm so happy you're taking these steps!