Livestrong Really Rocks

My father in law mentioned this website/iPhone app to me early in the holiday season, and after a month of using it, I find myself enthralled. A huge fan. Mildly obsessed.

Ahem. So, the website, www.livestrong.com, lets you sign up for free and track calories and exercise. This is not unique… but let me tell you the things I LOVE about it (and then I will share my few disappointments.)

1. The set up. Easy and free to set up, and so far, no overt marketing, spamming. Lets you set your goals for weight loss, maintenance, etc.
2. The database of food and exercises is huge! You enter in any Starbucks, Trader Joe, Quizno, Subway item, and its all there… you just click to add to your “daily plate”. Same thing with exercise. I enter “yoga” and it lets you easily pick from an intensity level, number of minutes etc. and THEN SUBTRACTS THOSE CALORIES from your daily plate. (yes, I’m shouting, its really fun to see those calories disappear.) And the range of exercises is really huge.. I’m not kidding, Milking Cows is included! (both with machines and totally manually.)
3. The Loops. I love to run and cycle outdoors, and the site works with Google Maps to easily let you map a “loop” complete with elevation, calorie count, etc. that you can save, share to facebook, add to your daily plate. You can see other people’s loops, so I now have new ideas for exercising in my neighborhood.

My (few) disappointments.

1. When you home cook, you need to either create recipe and enter nutition info, or manually add all the ingredients (such as turkey, egg, breadcrumbs in a meatloaf.) Though, you can easily “save the meal”, so you only have to do it once.) I think once they get more users doing this, you’ll find more common meals already entered.
2. The food entry process does not work well on a small screen (my lovely Acer Net book screen requires a lot of scrolling around.) Everything is optimized for the iPhone or a big monitor.

Small complaints, really. Net net... I love it. I highly recommend giving it a try if you’ve got any sort of weight loss or fitness goals you’d like support with.