Today, its not hard to find websites, advertisements and TV shows that glorify high fat and calorie foods through stunning and exotic visual displays and presentations. Needless to say, our high pressure lives give us a good enough excuse to indulge in a gooey triple layered choco-mouse cheesecake or a crispy bacon grilled cheese rollup now and again.
While that may be the most satisfying indulgence, it comes with a price - weight gains and ensuing medical issues. If you are or have become a food conscious person, you'll want to watch out for those excessive calories. If you are hoping to lose some weight as well, you need tools to help you track your calories and monitor your weight loss goals over a period of time.
There are plenty of smartphone apps that help in achieving these goals and since I have already talked about many of them in my older posts, this time, I'm going to be focusing on a wonderful web app called FoodCount.
FoodCount : A Meal Planner and Nutrition Calculator All Rolled into One
FoodCount is a calorie counting website you can sign up for free. When you sign up you have to provide some personal information such as your age, height, weight, weight goal and your activity levels. Based on your input, FoodCount will compute the amount of calories you can consume a day.
The FoodCount Meal Planner
The Home page of the website displays the Meal Planner where you can add details of your breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks consumed during the day. You can even plan your meals weeks in advance.The right pane displays the net calories you consumed against your targeted calorie intake.
Adding meals in FoodCount is easy. You just tap the Add button, search and select items from the existing database or pick items from your previous meal recordings. After you've added your meal, the right pane will display the nutrition chart showing the protein, fat, and carb breakdown.
The Meal Planner view offers a sensible breakdown of your nutritional data allowing you to plan your meals according to your targeted nutrition. If you have overindulged at lunch, you can compensate the extra calories during dinner.
The FoodCount Food Search
The Food Search section of the website has a vast collection of foods you can choose from. You won't just get restaurant items, you can even add home made recipes to the collection.
The FoodCount Recipes
FoodCount also has its own attractive recipe database. The Spotlight section offers 4 healthy recipes while a Featured Recipes section offers a platter of mouthwatering dishes that are equally healthy to try out.
The right sidebar offers Recipe tools where you can create your own recipes or import them from other websites. You can also sort popular and new recipes and find recipes submitted by the community. If you prefer to look for a categorized list, there's plenty to choose from; from beverages to desserts and salads. The key factor here is that everything is customizable, so if you want to make a smaller portion, you can modify the servings and if you want to substitute one ingredient for another, you can do that as well.
The FoodCount Meal Ideas
Running out of appetizing healthy recipe ideas? FoodCount has you covered in the Meal Ideas section, where you have a wide collection of recipes to choose from based on your eating preferences, from vegan, to gluten free or high protein meals.
The FoodCount Grocery Lists
If you've planned your meals for the day or week, there's no doubt you need to shop for ingredients you don't have. The Grocery section of the website lets you create lists for the purpose and if you have added meals from the database, this section will automatically add the ingredients to a list making your job a lot easier.
FoodCount also holds a Notification center that alerts you to new recipes, new items in your social feed, and new followers.
FoodCount has also recently introduced a handy Chrome Extension that lets you see the calorie count and nutritional data of any recipe you find online. So the next time you see a gorgeous image of a juicy cheese stuffed bacon wrapped green chilli burger and want to have one right away, you can evaluate its nutritional value before deciding to hit that Order button.
In my use of FoodCount, here's what I liked and didn't about the web app.
Likes
FoodCount is simple elegant web app that is easy to use and gives you just the information you need to monitor and track your calorie intake.
It has a rich collection of healthy recipes and lots of tools to add or import your homemade recipes or website finds.
The web app offers loads of healthy meal ideas and meal combo options you can try out.
Everything is easily customizable and you can crank up your weight loss goals if you are doing great or modify ingredients in your menu to meet your targeted calorie intake.
The Chrome extension is highly useful as it lets you instantly see the nutritional information of recipes online and lets you add items to the grocery list effortlessly.
Dislikes
Would love to see a smartphone app.
Final Thoughts
Logging in the daily food intake into a health app has never been a fun thing to do. FoodCount doesn't magically transform that experience but makes it a lot more straightforward and easy to do.
Just as the exotic image of a juicy cheeseburger makes you want to bite into one, the image of the nutritional chart displaying the unhealthy amount of calories, fats, and carbs that's going into your body is reminder that you need to be mindful of what you eat.
Eventually, I believe it is this information that will get you on the road to healthier eating and FoodCount is doing a great job of making you aware of every calorie you take in.
Check out FoodCount and tell us what you think!
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