Tesco Healthy Living Tracker - a free tool for healthy eating (Tesco Heathy Living Tracker)

Member Name: SilkCutSilver

Product:	Tesco Heathy Living Tracker
Date:	17/11/08 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Calories and fat content stored so you just enter what you have eaten

Disadvantages: Heaven forbid you eat a nut!

I love this site - and after trying the Tesco Diets site which you pay for - I love it even more.

What is it?-------------------------

The basic point of the site is that like Weight Watchers it uses your height/weight/activity level which you enter to determine the amoutn of calories or points you are allocated for a day. You then use the site to enter everything you have eaten in a day and you can see if you have reacher your target in the day or across a week period. Every food item on the site has calories/fat/salt etc stored so you only have to enter the food and the portion and the site caluclates how many points you have eaten.

How does it work?-----------------

The site is easy to use - you just enter in your details, choose a log in and password and away you go. It's not complex - the areas of the site are arranged as tabs, like Meals, Tracker, Summary.

The Pros-------

What is great about this site is it enables you to save meals you often eat and just add them to your day with one click - so for example if you make the same sandwich each day for lunch you can add all the ingredients to the meal and save it under 'My Sandwich' then all you have to do it add that to your days eating. Also if you have the same breakfast each day you can tick to add it to each day automatically. It's great to see your progress - you can wiegh in and also see daily and weekly summaries of your performance. If like me it helps you to monitiro what you are eating then this is the site for you. It's also free which is great.


Cons--------------

The cons of the site are mainly that the search function is really poor, you can often spend about 5 minutes looking for the item you want. Also I think it's driven from Tesco's product catalogue rather than meals in itself - so you have to add porridge oats, then milk for example when they could make it easier by just making it 'Porridge' with both included (who eats plain oats by themselves? Horses???). The water and treats tracker on the daily summary page don't seem to do much - they don't add or remove any points from your totals, though exercise does which is great.

My major concern with sites like this (and Weight Watchers actually) is that they make no concession for nutritional value, so often you will go over your points for eating (heaven forbid!) some nuts, or an avocado, or a salmon fillet - all of which are nutritionally sound choices but because they are high in calories/fat are seen as 'bad' by Tesco.

However if you have a sensible head on your shoulders and realise that no website is going to lose weight for you but that this is a useful free tool then this could definitely work for you.

Oh and I'll be writing a review on eDiets soon - advice for now - don't bother! The Tracker is 100 times better and free!

Summary: Great tool, free, easy to use