Shrinking Dude

I have been using Fitday.com to track my calories on and off for three years now. Fitday is a great free site, and works really well for what it is. However in all this time the service has not seen any major overhauls, and aside from mostly visual changes it has remained the the same.

A few days ago I ran into a similar site. Figwee.com. Figwee stands out from other nutritional tracking services by making it easier to track you caloric intake more accurately.

Figwee believes: “People Have a Visual Relationship with Food. When we think about the food we eat, we fundamentally think in pictures. So, the simplest way to measure and track what we eat is to do so visually.”

It is very easy to track what you eat when you are at home and you have packaged food with nutritional information on the back. You just plug in the info, and you’re done. How about when you go out to dinner, and lets say you order Chicken Caesar Salad? This is where Figwee can really win big. You can search their food database and find the salad, and once you add it to your foods, you can use a slider to estimate the portion size. While this obviously isn’t going to be 100% accurate, we can probably say that it’s more accurate that guessing the numbers completely. If Figwee can manage to have a large enough food database (that the community can contribute to), it will become much more accurate.

Figwee also has some other pretty neat features. Based on your weight, height and weight goals it can figure out approximately how many calories you should be taking in each day, in order to meet your goals. So when you add a food eaten to your diary, you can see how many calories you have left for the day. You can also choose to restrict your diet based on grams of carbs, or use your own calorie restrictions.

Figwee is currently running an open beta. It’s still a little rough around the edges, and unfortunately as of this moment the ability to add a new food seems to be not working properly. However, this is still one of the best nutrition tracking sites I’ve seen, and it’s definitely worth a try. It’s looks like it going to be a paid service once it’s fully launched, so if you want to give a spin for free now is your chance.