on the hunt...

THE GOAL

In the last month, I've realized that I no longer want to lose weight to look "good" or "thin", but that I need to start losing weight for health purposes. I'm hardly grossly overweight - my BMI is at 24, and I'm a happy size 6 - but I'm hitting 30 this year, and want to start establishing a healthy lifestyle that I'll maintain through stress or famine or happy times. I can't keep using the excuse of "no time" to go to the gym, "too much stress" to not eat healthy, or "too much to do" to relax.

Basically, I've come to grips with the fact that I'm an overachieving stressball, and that my life will never be in perfect balance.

An article in Fitness magazine also really woke me up. Apparently, if you have gained more than 11 lbs since high school, you're at risk for diabetes. In addition, people with waistlines over 32 inches are also at risk for health problems. And most importantly, studies have shown that people who weigh less earn more :-)

So this year, I'm getting serious about making a healthy lifestyle a priority. And I don't mean, I'm going on a diet or I need to lose 10 lbs for a this-that event or I'm going to obsessively exercise like I did back in Seattle. I'm aiming to reduce my body fat % by at least 5% and my weight by about 10lbs over the course of the year.

THE HUNT BEGINS

Thus, I'm on the hunt for the perfect diet tracking software/program. What I'm looking for:

• Recommended caloric intake
• Meal and exercise tracker
• Exercise planner: Input my schedule of planned activities over the week to see if I meet them
• Calorie database that includes ethnic foods. The test: Korean food
• Blogging option. If not a blogging option, at least a journaling one.
• Goals/Rewards. Through my discovery, I've realized how important it is to input short- and long-term goals, and associated rewards.
• Associated mood
• Picture upload
• Ease of use and good UI

So far, the most critical test has been the calorie database. Come on, I live in SF and I'm Chinese. There's no way that I'm going to be eating pasta and sauce everyday, and tracking calories from chain restaurants aren't going to cut it! If it takes me 10 minutes to google a recipe or food and then cut and paste the nutritional information, you know its going to fail.

THE RESULTS

In the last 2 days at home, I've searched for and signed up for free trials over probably about 10 programs. (You cannot imagine how hard this is when you're on a modem.) Here are the results to date:

• iShape.com. Sounded really promising. I'm a big fan of Shape magazine, and I like that you are emailed your meal plan and exercise schedule, either the day of or the day before. In addition, there are nice features that I would expect from Shape - i.e., recommended weight training exercises and the right way to do them.
  
  Unfortunately, while I've gotten a the email for today and tomorrow's meal plan, I haven't been able to actually log on to the site. Everytime I log in, I'm prompted to go through my entire preferences profile again, and then at the end it gives me a cookie error. Now I'm not technical queen, but I've tried this on two browsers, with multiple internet security and privacy settings and its not working. I'm contacting Customer Service tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, it gets a big thumbs down for its most important feature: functionality.
  
  
• PersonalFitnessPlanner. I'm also a fan of Fitness magazine - even more than Shape - so I decided to be fair and give it a whirl. Great UI, asked for much more info regarding my measurements than iShape, and it allowed me to specify how much weight I wanted to lose. (Strangely enough, iShape does that for you.)
  
  Hrmph. Then came the kicker: I could not log what I actually ate today. I had something relatively simple and common to American cuisine - poached eggs and chicken apple sausage - but you can only eat what they recommend to you or find a substitute meal. Even substitute foods individually would have been better. I was disappointed and canceled my subscription immediately.
  
  
• myfooddiary.com. Also recommended by Fitness, I checked it out and really like the UI. It seemed to be more of a pure calorie tracker, which seemed more flexible to me after my experience with iShape and PersonalFitnessPlanner, and I was fine with not having a plan or inputting my schedule ahead of time. I liked the fact that they have a "refridgerator", which allows you to save your favorite foods, and that you could customize the activities you commonly do.
  
  The test came when I came home from dinner with the parents and tried to log in my Korean meal. What a pain! It took forever, the recipe builder didn't work as I expected. Plus there's a lot of confusion over how you actually enter in food and whether or not you're finished for the day. I already paid the $9 for the month, no cancelations or free trials. Stay away unless you truly do eat mac n cheese everyday.
  
  
• Others. I also looked at some others, mostly to see what their calorie database was like, with disappointing results. I briefly tried fitwatch.com (the free version), but was disappointed by its UI. StartMyDiet.com had the blogging features, but the site was so misleading - it says that you can use the free version, but it didn't allow you to track foods! - so I decided against that one as well. It seemed sketchy to me. I searched on both About.com and Download.com found a couple of actual software packages that you can download for 30 days, but that will have to wait until I'm back in high speed land again.

THE VERDICT

I guess what I'm looking for is flexibility to customize, and most importantly, a database of ethnic foods. Yes, I understand that Americans are really fat, and that is the audience we're catering to, but no one living in a decent sized city can really succeed without being able to track ethnic food calories. Note to product makers: Look for your sophisticated audience, those are the ones who will pay a price for this kind of service. Or have add on features.

Ironically enough, so far the best site has been Weight Watchers, which I have been using on and off since last year. I didn't really appreciate how easy it was, or how impressive its food database was. Yes, I still need to input my recipes for some foods, and no, it doesn't have the journaling, mood or goal tracking features that I'd like to find. And I'm not sure how I like their exercise tracker. But from a food perspective, its surprisingly the best one. I guess it should be - it costs at least twice as much as comparative programs.

The hunt continues...