Calorie Count

You can find free, intelligent, online dieting resources at Calorie Count, as a service of About.com Health.

Talk about easy. It only takes a few minutes to join and once you answer a few easy questions, your individual diet page is all ready to go. Just type in the foods you eat and the amount of exercise you do, and Calorie Count tells you how many calories you have eaten, or burned, and how healthy your diet is for the day.

I use Calorie Count a lot, and here is why I love it:

1. The diet profile quiz helps you figure out what kind of an eater you are. Are you an emotional eater? An excessive eater? A strategist? Calorie Count has tips to help you change your eating habits to fit your dieting type.

2. Almost every food you can eat and any activity under the sun is available in the databases. Even brand names and restaurant foods are available. Just browse or search and add to your daily food or activity log. For easy entry, you can tag the foods and meals you eat frequently -- awesome, fun and easy.

3. You can pick your portion so it easy to choose the portion sizes you actually eat. It is so frustrating to use a book or a diet site that has ounces of peanuts when you just ate a quarter of a cup. Calorie Count makes it easy to choose your portion size -- no math required.

4. The recipe analyzer might be the coolest tool on the site. Just how healthy is grandma's tuna casserole? Enter the ingredients and the number of servings and Calorie Count gives you the nutrition information per serving in the style of a Nutrition Facts food label and gives your recipe a grade of A through F.

5. Join the Calorie Count community -- share the pain and share the joy. I know that dieting really isn't much fun. Sometimes it helps to share your experiences with other people going through the same thing. At Calorie Count, you can post messages on a forum or write your thoughts in a private daily journal. Or both.

   You have your own home page where you can create a personal journal, photo gallery, links to you friends, tools to track your weight changes, and automatically track the threads you start and posts you make to the forums.

6. You can get nutrition info on your phone. If you aren't next to your computer at lunch, you can still find out how many calories are in that bagel by looking it up on your cell phone.

7. You have an eat meter and burn meter right on your account page or displayed on your Tool Bar to let you know instantly whether you are on track for your daily calorie counts.

8. Calorie Count analyzes your diet for calories and nutrients. Hmm...dinner time and not enough fiber? Better eat more vegetables. Too much sodium? How about fresh fruit for dessert? Hold your cursor over the date for more information.

9. It's free!

Remember that a healthy diet is more than just calories, it is also vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates, protein and fiber. One of the reasons diets fail is because people focus on just the calories or the carbs or the whatever, but not on the whole picture. Calorie Count gives you everything you need to eat healthy and be fit.