livestrong.com
Something has to change, so I joined livestrong.com, (one of) Lance Armstrong’s commercial enterprise. It’s a thing where you can track your calorie intake and exercise output, set goals, that sort of thing. (Not to be confused with livestrong.org, his non-profit charity foundation.)
At first, I was tempted to open an account at nutritiondata.com. I’ve had a few interactions with the guy that started that, and really like what he’s doing. Then I found out the whole enterprise was sold to Conde Nast, so I’m not so keen on that any more. Not sure why, really, but there it is. Besides, it seems to track only food, not exercise.
While I’m sure that Armstrong has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of livestrong.com (he has a staff for that), he’s lent his imprimatur to it, and from what I know of him, if it weren’t up to his standard, heads would roll.
That said, it’s a little buggy. As far as I can tell, it’s a website they either purchased or have gone into partnership with called TheDailyPlate.com. The idea, they layout, and the way it works is intuitive and well laid out. One of the buggy features I’ve run into so far is the Recipe creation thing.
What you’re supposed to be able to do is create a recipe of stuff in the database, assign portions and yields. The site calculates the nutritional breakdown of the recipe from the ingredients, then you can track servings of that thing in your meal record. But once the recipe is created, it’s impossible to edit it. I could swear I was able to edit it yesterday, but not today. When trying to add another ingredient, for example, the amount and units fields are not editable, and the new ingredient is not saved. The same for trying to edit an ingredient already included (to change the amount, for example). It’s not saved. I’m sure it’s a bug, but it’s strange.
Then second weird thing is you can enter new foods that aren’t on your list, which is great. Their database is extensive, but not all inclusive. How could it be? When you add a new item, you either provide them with a scan of the nutrition label from it, or a URL to the manufacturer’s nutrition data. A great way to do it.
But if you don’t want to do that, they have a “generic calorie” which you can add in an ad hoc fashion. I went to the MFA on Friday and had lunch there, so decided just ot ball park what I had based on similar things in the database. Since I don’t plan on doing that very often, and have no way to obtain the nutritional information, it seemed best to do it that way. So I took a guess, and added 350 “servings” of a generic 1-calorie. I came back the next day and the calorie content of the “generic calorie” was changed to 1355, making my 350-calorie item now worth almost 500,000 calories. Yikes! That throws the scale off a bit.
But so far, it seems to be interesting if nothing else. I do like the way it works. You enter your height, weight, age, and goal (lose 2lb/wk, lose 1lb/wk, maintain, gain 1lb/wk, gain 2lb/wk, &c), and your daily activity level (sedentary, mildly active, very active, &c), and it calculates a calorie goal to achieve that goal. You enter additional exercise above and beyond the “daily activity level” separately.
They also have a lot of advice on other health aspects (sleep, stress, &c) and a youtube channel with tons of videos on eating and exercise and whatnot.
The food tracking thing comes in several flavors that you can switch between. One of them is diabetes specific in which you can track blood glucose. It provides some graphical information that’s really helpful in illustrating how certain foods and exercise affect your BG levels. Very nice.
The side provides a lot of support and interactivity in the sort of social network milieu that I’m not particularly interested in and won’t be participating in, but it does show a commitment to meeting the needs and desires of their user base. This is something the ADA should have done long ago, and they did sort do a half hearted stab at it, but I can’t even find the site any more.
So we’ll see how it goes. It’s been less than a week, but it’s interesting so far.
