I’ve been using a site called FitDay for a bit over a week now and I wanted to give you folks a review since I’m finding the site to be very useful.

FitDay is a general fitness and health site that helps you track your day to day activities, foods eaten and trends. It’s essentially an online food and activity journal with some fancy reporting. I actually tried out FitDay two years ago I believe and didn’t like it much. I guess my needs have changed since the site has remained the same and yet, I’m really liking it these days.

Home Screen

The first thing you do with FitDay is enter in some information about yourself. It’s pretty basic stuff such as gender, height and age. You also enter in a bit of information about your lifestyle. One thing to note is that you shouldn’t factor exercise into this lifestyle entry. That’s going to come later when you enter in activities. There’s also the option of making your FitDay journal public, which I’ve gone ahead and done. You can see my own FitDay journal here.

Foods Screen

Here’s where FitDay starts getting useful. The foods page is a very nice online food journal that will help you track what you eat and when you ate it. It includes a quick breakdown of where you’re getting your calories and how balanced your diet is along with all the things you ate that day. As with any food journal, there is manual work that you have to do, but FitDay makes that relatively easy.

For example, as you can see in the screenshot, I ate pumpkin pie at breakfast today. So when I try to enter that into FitDay I have a few options:

• I can search FitDay for all foods matching pumpkin pie, select the appropriate portion size and go with it. That’s the choice I usually use since FitDay has a good database of foods already entered in.
• I can browse foods until I find one I want to enter in. This isn’t as useful for meal entry but I’ve found it interesting reading.
• I can choose from foods I entered in recently. This is actually the choice I used for the pumpkin pie since I ate some of it on Tuesday too. This is just a short cut to foods you’ve searched for in the recent past, but I find it useful.
• You can enter in your own custom food. This is another great option and it works great for things like packaged food or things you buy at restaurants with posted nutritional information. Just get the information from the package or the restaurant and enter it here.

For the most part, I’ve found every food I’ve eaten in the past week relatively fast. I had to search through some options on occasion but it’s never taken more than a minute to find a food that’s relatively close to what I ate with a serving size that matches. That right there makes this a worthwhile tool since, in the past, I’ve stopped using food journals when they became too much work to maintain.

Activity Screen

Like the food screen, the activity screen is basically a fancy journal. It has the same options for searching through FitDay’s activity database, browsing activities or using activities you recently entered. It does not have the ability to enter in custom activities but I’m not sure this is a serious flaw since their activity database seems rather complete. The page also has a neat little chart that shows you where your calorie expenditure is going.

Reports Screen

If the last two screens were useful on a day to day level, then the report screen becomes more and more useful over time. All the data you collect through your journals is available here for reporting purposes. You can see where you usually spend your calories over the past month. You can see a break down of calories consumed vs. spent over the past week. You can even see a chart that shows you if you’re meeting your nutritional requirements over a certain period of time. After just a week of using this site, I’m already finding useful information in these reports. I can see how my protein consumption is going, something I’ve worried about since becoming vegetarian. I can also see how well I’m doing in my goal of going to 200lbs. So I can see these reports becoming even more useful as time goes by.

Other Screens

There are a few other screens where you can enter in goals, enter your weight and add comments in a journal format. I haven’t used them too much yet so I’m not going to go into much detail. They look neat but not as useful as the food and activity tracking and reporting.

What I like about FitDay

Easy and Quick – I’ve found FitDay to be very easy to use and very fast. I’ve always had issues with other online sites that were either too complex or too slow. FitDay seems to have the barebones I need, in a format that’s friendly and with great performance. I’ve never needed to wait for site refreshes and I’ve never sat there at a complete loss as to how to do something.

Journals – FitDay is a great journal for both food and activities. Up until now, I’ve found that tracking my food and activities over time was a hassle. There was too much work to do and I never had the right program to do it with. Because FitDay is online, I can do it anywhere and anytime. So it’s convenient. FitDay also does the tracking and analysis for me, all I need to do is enter in stuff.

Quick Nutrient Breakdown – I love the quick breakdowns in the food section. Last night I came home and felt a bit hungry. I looked at FitDay and noticed that my total calories for the day were a bit low and my total protein was also low. A quick smoothie and protein supplement later, and I was feeling full and satisfied. I don’t check FitDay before every meal, but it’s nice to know the information is available for situations like this.

Reports - If there’s one area FitDay really shines, it’s the reports. Food and activity journals are great, but the ones I did myself rarely had any sort of analysis built in. I couldn’t see any trends and this made it difficult for me to spot issues. With FitDay, I have access to reports that I’m finding very useful. Even something simple like seeing how my weight is changing over time is easy. I don’t have to graph or chart anything myself, just enter in the information whenever I get it and let FitDay do the rest.

What I Don’t Like About FitDay

BMI - First of all, FitDay insists on telling me I’m obese whenever I enter in my weight. I’m assuming this is based on a BMI calculations. Guess what, it’s completely inaccurate according to my last physical, which included a body fat analysis. That’s a minor quibble though since BMI itself is the issue, being very inaccurate for people with a low or high amount of muscle mass.

Daily Calorie Expenditure – FitDay seems to have calculated a relatively high daily calorie burn rate for me. Without taking into account my workouts, FitDay believes I am spending about 3100 calories a day. I’m still trying to verify this number but this could just be my own poor math skills and not FitDay’s issue.

Reports – As much as I like them, I want more! Give me more details, more breakdowns and more ways to slice and dice the data.

Workout Tracker – Would be nice to be able to track a workout on FitDay, down to what exercises I did and with what weights. There’s other sites that do this but I hate using multiple sites for related things. I want everything in one place where it’s easy to see and compare.

So Is FitDay Worth Using?

Yes, I think so. I’m not spending much time maintaining my information (maybe 10 minutes total each day) and for that time investment, I’m getting back a lot of useful data. So I think I’ll keep going with this service and see how much I like it a month or two from now.