I’m always looking for resources on the Internet that will help me to maintain my current weight which took so much work to get to. One website that I stumbled upon is www.calorieconnect.com which is a free online wellness center.    It would have been nice to find something like this about a year ago when I was counting calories like crazy, but that’s okay   They have a few different free services, but my favorite is their calorie counter.

With the calorie counter, all you have to do is start typing the name of a food that you have eaten, and it will instantly start pulling up results for you to choose from.  For example,  I was searching for wheat bread. After I was done typing in my search, it pulled up a list of different wheat bread items.  Then I could click the one that fit my search, and all of the dietary information is displayed from calories and fat to carbs and calcium.  The picture below shows what their calorie counter looks like.

Another option is to create a profile where you can keep track of nutrition and exercise targets.  I created a profile in just a couple of minutes.  You enter your age, sex, height, and weight, and then it calculates your BMI or your body mass index.  This is a very general indication of your weight status. For example, my normal BMI is between 108 and 146 pounds. 

After you’ve created a profile, you can create nutrition and exercise targets. This includes what your daily goals are for calories, fat, protein, calories burned, minutes exercised ,etc.  Each day you can enter in your values for each of them, and then you can track your progress and targets, and view 7 day and 30 day averages.

Part of the calorie counter includes recording the foods that you have eaten so that you can easily keep track.  Another nice feature is that you can add a custom food to the database, one that they don’t have but that you have the information for. Really, this entire site is about keeping track of the elements that will help you stay healthy, and lose weight.  I’ve found CalorieConnect very helpful, and hopefully you will too.