I started an account at fitday.com to track my diet and exercise. It’s a free account, and it’s a pretty decent way to keep a log of food and activities. I don’t always trust what they have for nutritional values of various foods, so most of the time I just put in what’s on the label of whatever I’m eating, or I look it up at the Calorie King website.

But, overall it’s a pretty neat little program. I do find it helpful to log my food intake since it helps me control the little snackings that can really destroy a weight-loss program. And this thing calculates the whole calories in/calories out thing and charts progress, and is generally nifty enough to keep a geek like me happy.

Well, mostly happy. I had a major geekout this evening and created a spreadsheet to keep track of my weight and bodyfat percentage, with additional columns to calculate actual pounds of fat lost versus muscle gained, as well as a running total of fat lost and total weight lost. I’m also going to add a column to my weekly progress chart for bodyfat %. I have a Tanita scale/bodyfat monitor, as well as a handheld Omron Bodyfat Analyzer. Since they both work by sending a tiny electrical current through your body and measuring the impedance to calculate your bodyfat percentage, and since the scale tends to send the current up one leg and down the other and the Omron sends it up one arm and down the other, my Grand Plan is that averaging the readouts of both devices should give me a fairly accurate means of tracking my overall progress.

Yeah, I know, I’ve gone completely off the deep end with this. But hey, it keeps me motivated!