The following article was originally written for CompareItAll.com. The rights have reverted to the author.
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Fitness depends on discipline. Information helps. Products help. But you have to work at both nutrition and exercise regularly and consistently to achieve your goals. Also, in many cases, you have to change old habits and build new ones.
To have a chance of succeeding, you need a quick and easy way to check, record, and total the values of the food you are eating (calories, cholesterol, vitamins, minerals, etc.) and compare that total to your goals. You need to keep track of when and how much you've exercised. You also need easy and eye-catching ways to compare your progress to your goals, both as a reward/motivation and also as a conscience.
CBS Health Watch (cbs.healthwatch.com) seems to do an excellent job of this. After you have registered ("personalized"), through their Daily Diary, you can use their site to keep track of your health goals and your progress toward them (nutrition, blood pressure, weight and exercise, medication, dr. visits). They store your personal records for you and let you view them in a variety of ways, including graphs. You can set up separate files for all your family members.
Of course, "fitness" depends on many factors that are unique to you. The choices that appear for you to monitor and record in your Daily Diary depend on the health "channels" that you select in your personal profile, focusing on factors that should matter to you. The choices can include: nutrition calculator, exercise, weight, medication, therapies, doctor visits, blood pressure, peak flow (emotional ups and downs), flare-ups (e.g. of asthma), and blood glucose.
These tools could be extremely helpful if you are on a strict diet or need to be reminded about medications or doctor visits. If you are basically healthy, and are trying to lose weight and make sure you eat a balanced diet, this site can become your online conscience.
By way of the records you keep you can learn more about your own habits and how your body works -- its natural cycles, for instance, of weight loss and gain. (E.g., I've become obsessed with this tool over the last week. I've cut my average calorie intake nearly in half, and now I'm exercising enough to burn off about 400 calories per day, and over that time my weight has gone up a pound. Help! I tell myself, that has to be a cycle; I just have to be patient and consistent.)
At the same time you learn the nutritional value of the foods that you eat regularly, and the deficits and overages that were part of your normal eating habits in the past. Soon you start substituting for the high calorie foods you've been eating regularly low calorie ones that you like just as much. Soon you start entering your meals and checking the values before you cook them, so you can make last-minute adjustments.
Meanwhile the food database remembers the foods that you've entered before and places those items it the top of the list to make it easier for you to find/select your favorites (rather like the anticipation in Quicken).
NB -- the Nutrition Calculator doesn't work with all browsers and systems. It works great with my laptop, but I can't get it to work at all on my desktop PC -- using the same browser. Also, while the site provides useful calculations and graphs related to nutrition and weight, the exercise record is simply a list. They do not calculate the implications of exercise in terms of calories burned and do not combine the nutrition and exercise information.
The fitness, wellness, and mental health sections at Dr. Koop (www.drkoop.com) consist mainly of articles. But there are some "tools" that do simple calculations, based on your answers to one or two questions. Under nutrition, you find calculators for body mass (based on height to weight ratio), calories burned, carbohydrates, ideal weight, protein, and waist-to-hip ratio. Under tackling tobacco, you find calculators for cost of smoking and nicotine dependency, as well as a 24-hour support chat. Under weight loss, the calculators are the same as under nutrition, plus a target heart rate tool.
Their "Preventionnaire" is a long series of questions to which you can only answer yes, no, or unsure. With just one question per screen, there is a long lag time (the slower your connection, the longer the lag). After you spend 15-20 minutes, you get a list of simple, common sense, well-known recommendations -- nothing tailored for your needs (e.g., "limit sweets between meals," consider getting a flu shot in the fall").
At WebMD (www.webmd.com), enter the Consumer Site. There you'll find articles in Living Better and Sports and Fitness. "Health-E-Meter" is where you'll find some useful calculators. Try "Dessert wizard" to learn how long you'll have to exercise to burn off the calories from particular desserts, and "Ovulation" to determine the days of the month that someone is most likely to become pregnant. In "Birth Stages," pregnant women can enter the date of their last menstrual period and get dates for all the stages of their pregnancy, with pictures and explanations of the embryo/fetus development. The "Weight Gain Estimator" helps pregnant women keep track of how much they should expect to gain during pregnancy. With the "Kid's Height Predictor, you enter the height, weight, and age of your child, and get an estimated adult height. The Target Heart Rate calculator helps you determine how hard your heart should be working after certain exercises.
Dr. Weil (www.pathfinder.com/drweil) offers a useful Vitamin Adviser. Answer a simple multiple choice series of questions and it builds a profile for you, while at the same time providing general advice screen-by-screen. At the end it gives you a tailored list of vitamins and dosages (strangely, it never asks your weight, which, one would suspect, should affect dosage). Here too you'll find an Herbal Medicine Chest, with recommendations for what to stock season by season.
iVillage's AllHealth (www.allhealth.com) has numerous tools and lots of opportunity for interaction with other visitors in forums and chats. From the home page, you can go straight to tools designed to calculate weight, determine health risk, and maintain your medical records at their site. "Online psych" consists of interactive tests, quizzes, and surveys "to challenge, inform, intrigue, and educate you. You'll find everything from online screening tests for mental health issues to fun surveys about relationships."
In the Fitness area, you'll find tools for bone loss checkup, clinical trials, digital conscience, elder care look-up, and your health report. For digital conscience, you choose a goal (stop smoking, lose weight, get in shape, take better care of yourself) and then choose the personality for your conscience (mom, friend, or no-nonsense coach). Then you provide your email address and you'll get reminder email messages every Sunday
In Wellness, you'll find three-minute videos about "fun workouts," "kids and safety," "sculpt," "stretch," and "treat yourself right." Here the Health Calculator includes body mass index, healthy weight, waist-hip ratio, daily caloric requirement, daily carbohydrate requirement, daily protein requirement, daily fat requirement, target heart rate, activity (how many calories various activities burn). You can check off a few or all of them and take care of all at once.
You might find that one of these sites fits your personal style and goals, and return to it again and again. (I must admit that over the last week or so I've been going back to CBS Health Watch several times a day, obsessively entering everything I eat as well as my weight and exercise record. If entering all that info burnt up a lot of calories, I'd be in great shape...
On the other hand, you may use a calculator, read an article there, and wind up using half a dozen or more fitness/wellness sites on a regular basis. Just don't be surprised if you see differing recommendations at different sites. For instance, when I calculate my daily caloric requirement at AllHealth, they tell me that I need 2770 calories a day -- that is the "amount of energy your body needs in order to live." But when I do my profile at CBS Health Watch, they recommend that I set a goal of 2000 or less calories a day. Such differences signal to me that you should not take the advice of any of these calculators at any of these Web sites as gospel truth. They are rough estimates based on statistical data, and as such may be very useful as a starting point for a discussion with your physician or professional weight/exercise adviser.
More thoughts about exercise and its relation
to weight loss: Just Can't Weight?
Online shopping advice
The Online Shopping Directory
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