Helps you focus on your food!!! (foodfocus.co.uk)

Member Name: valve90210

Product:	foodfocus.co.uk
Date:	29/07/09 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great tools for logging food and exercise. Data presented in easy to understand ways

Disadvantages: It doesn't give you any more will power than you had!!

As someone who has a huge love of food, and a sedantry life style mainly due to working in an office and hence being sat at a desk all day everyday, I have over the years gradually put on weight and now I really want to do something about it!

Now, like most people who have tried to lose weight, I have tried a few different 'fad' type diets which all work to an extent but once you stop doing them, the weight soon returns.

The best way to lose weight is through a caloprie controlled diet whereby you eat less calories in a day then your body burns off but it is not always that easy to keep tabs on exactly how many calories you have eaten in a day. As such a tool which allows you to log what you've eaten, that counts up your calories and shows you how you are doing in comparison to what your body is burning, would be a great thing, and this is exactly where Food Focus comes in.

It is a website which is free to join and give you some great tools to help you with your calorie controlled diet.

The first stage is to enter your details as they are at present. You enter your gender, date of birth, height and start weight, then move on to give a few details about your lifestyle - do you have an active or sedentary lifestyle
- are you a smoker or a vegan?

Then you move on to your goals, you can enter a target weight and a weekly weight change goal (limited to a maximum of 2lbs a week). You can also enter an average daily exercise goal in either minutes per day or calories burnt per day.

Once this is entered the magic behind thge website works out how many calories your body will be burning per day, your BMI and gives you target date for reaching your target weight which gives you something good to aim for.

Now you are ready to start using the tools on the site, there are only really two tools, the food log and the exercise log. There is the third tool, the body log which is simply the area whereby you enter your current weight every so often to log how your weight is going (hopefully downwards).

*** EXERCISE LOG ***

The Exercise log is where you can enter what activities you have done during the day and what calories you have burnt. This is done using a drop down menu which contains a large amount of activities and should cover pretty much everything you would need. Even if the specific activity is not listed there will be something similar that you can choose. You then enter the number of minutes you did the exercise for and hit go. This will add the exercise to your log and calculate the approximate number of calories burnt doing the exercise.

I often find the approximated calories is a little on the low side but that is fine by me, I would much rather the site under-estimates how many calories I have burnt than over-estimate!

*** FOOD LOG ***

The Food Log is much the same but is for logging the food you have eaten in a day.

There is a search box for you to find the food you have eaten in the food database and having been using it for a while now I have to say it is a pretty comprehensive database, contain numerous different foods from a wide variety of different brands along with generic food item information (for example generic figures for cucumbers, meat etc).

As I have said, the database is very comprehensive and you are very likely to be able to find what you have eaten.

Once you have found it, you click on it and are given a whole lot of information about the food, including the nutritional values of 100gs and a break down of carbs, protein, fat and alcohol - which is show in a very simple to understand pie-chart.

You can then enter the size of the serving you had. Often there are preset serving sizes, for example for a chocolate bar there is likely to be a serving size of 1 bar. Alternatively you can enter the exact weight (or volume for
liquids) you had. You can also enter a quantity if necessary (say if you'd eaten 2 chocolate bars..).

Next you enter when you ate the food, choosing from Breakfast, Morning Tea, Lunch, Afternoon Tea, Dinner or Late. I wasn't really sure why this was important to begin with but having used it for a while now I understand; on the pages which show you lots of statistics, it helps to identify if there are 'problem' times for you during the week when you might be consuming a large amount of calories etc.

Once you have filled in what you have eaten, you hit go and it is added to your food log and the calories are shown.

If you have cooked something from a recipe or just thrown something together from raw ingredients, you can go to the create a meal section of the Food Log, which allows you to enter everything you used in the creation of the meal.

This is very useful if you cook from scratch a lot as it can be difficult to keep a track of what calories are in home cooked foods.

It is also very useful if you have certain meals a lot, for example, when I am at work I have the same salad with my lunch each day so I have created a meal containing the correct amounts of cucumber, tomato etc. This saves me time when entering my food for the day as rather than searching for each item individually each day I can instead just go to the meals section, select my salad and add 1 portion to my food log!

This is a real time saver if there are meals you eat a lot!

If you are unable to find eactly the food item you are looking for using ther search, there is the option to manually add the food item. On this section you enter the brand name, a description and the nutritional values from the packaging of the food. You can also enter the serving size which is helpful when it comes to adding it to your food log!

Any of the foods you enter can be added to your favourite foods list. This is useful for food which you eat freqently as you can simply go to your favourite foods list and pick directly from there which can be quicker than searching for them every time.

As you add the food you have eaten during the day, the log adds up the calories you have eaten during the day and what you have left until you get to you calorie target (more a maximum limit than a target really).


*** DASHBOARD ***

Once you have entered items into your food log and exercise log, that is a good start but having these logs is not very useful unless there is an easy way to see any trends that are occurring, or any progress you are making etc. That is where the Dashboard comes into play.

Essentially this is the area of the site which takes the data entered into the logs and presents it to you in an easy to understand and useful way.

To start with there are some body weight figures which show your current weight, your starting weight, your target weight and your Goal weight. These are backed up by a line graph showing the progression of your weight (from the data you can enter in the body log) compared to a line for your target weight. If all goes to plan you will see a nice visualisation of your weight gradully falling to that of your target weight, which is surprisingly pleasing, much more so than just plain old figures!

Next there are some figures for Calories per day which serves mainly as a reminder of the target calories you are trying to remain under each day, and an average calories per day which will help you see if on average you are staying under the target calories. These figures are backed up by three graphs which I shall explain shortly.

Next are some exercise perday figures which work in the same way as the calories per day figures, showing your target exercise per day, and an average to show if, on average, you are exercising as much as your target.

Along with the weight graph there are three more graphs which are really quite useful.

The first is a line graph showing three lines. One being the amount of calories your body will naturally burn in a day, the second line showing your target calories per day and the third showing your actual caloires eaten per day. Ideally your calories eaten line will remain below the target line. this graph is useful as it shows if there have been any days when you ate substantially more calories than others or even went over the target. This is helpful as it can indicate any 'problem' times when more calories than usual have been consumed. Identifying such times is one of the keys to weight loss as it makes you realise when you have over eaten and as such you can be more on your guard at such times.

An example of this that I noticed from my figures was that on a thursday I seemed to be eating more calories than any other day and on occassion it was pushing me over my target. This was due to me attending a pub quiz each Thursday at which supper was provided. Being more aware that this was causing a spike in my calories, I felt more inclined to either not eat at the quiz or be very much more strict with myself!

The next graph is a bar chart showing the calories in each meal each day. This again helps to identify any problem times during the week allowing you to be more conscious of such times which can be very helpful!

The last graph is a line graph showing the mix of the calories you have consumed, there is a line for fat, carbs and protein. This helps you to see if you are getting a well balanced diet or if you are eating alot of fat for example, which again can help highlight problems and give you the chance to work on your diet to make it more balanced!

There is an option on the dashboard for what period of time you want the graphs to show the data, this can be 7 days, 2 weeks, 4 weeks or 3 months, this is a great feature as it allows you to see recent times in detail or you can look at a longer time period to see trends and progression on the graphs.

Personally I find the visual approach of the graphs really helpful and much more pleasing to look at than just tables of weight figures. I also find it a real incentive when you start to see the lines on the weight graph start to drop!


*** Conclusion ***

This website is a really useful tool for keeping track of your eating habits and exercise and presents you with the information in really useful grpahs etc that I personally find to be helpful in identifying 'problem' times which makes it easier to be in control as you are more aware of what you are eating.

The food database is very comprehensive and works incredibly well, the favourite foods and meal creating are extremely useful and great time savers!

This really is a helpful site when it comes to controlled weightloss via calorie counting!!!

The only slight negative is the fact that it will still take a lot of will power to maintain a healthy diet and actually exercise and lose the weight!!!

Summary: A good tool in the weight loss battle!!