Livestrong.com Review...

In my quest to stop drinking Pepsi and develop some healthier eating habits, I have begun using a website recommended to me by a work colleague called Livestrong. My meals are healthy enough (except when I get takeaway) but my issue is snacking. I have mainly been using the calorie counter tool on the site.

You begin by signing up for a free account and then inputting your data, such as your height, weight, and weight goals. The site then works out for you how many calories you should be consuming

You can track your daily food intake each day, and categorise it under breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, or a particular hour of the day.

OK, so today I may have gone to the beach and had fish and chips for lunch, but hey, when it's a sunny 27 and you're dog sitting, you would too! Basically, you start typing in the food or drink you had and it finds the food for you with all the calories, protein, salt, sugar and other dietary information, and calculates it towards your total. You can adjust the serving size that you ate, as well, and you can add a new food if it doesn't appear (for example, I added Nudie Orange Juice a couple of days ago, which took a couple of minutes to do).

You can see that on Friday my calories were WAAAAAAAY over as I ate lots of Dominos pizza. I was surprised how full of calories the pizza was, since I get my pizza cheese free (I don't eat cheese as I don't like it) and I don't have many meats on my pizza, mainly veggies, so I'm thinking the base and tomato paste must be 95% sugar with just enough flour or tomato or whatever to disguise it as pizza base or tomato paste.  I'm on a pretty low calorie amount due to weight loss goals but it does adjust your calories allowed once you start inputting your weight (and hopeful weight loss). The site also allows you to put in your exercise for the day (I use mapmywalk.com to log distance in my walks with the dog) and then gives you more calories to your daily allowance depending on how much and how vigorous your exercise was. At the moment my main aim is cutting back on sugar (hence giving up Pepsi, but I did have a full strength Pepsi with my fish and chips today at lunch) but the site also breaks down the other elements to your food and how much left you have in percentage of your daily allowance.

It's really interesting to see how much some foods send your calories right over. Sure, it's no surprise that unhealthy foods are going to be higher calories, but I didn't expect Domino's pizza to be as high in calories as a Whopper from Hungry Jacks.

Everyone needs takeaway every now and again, and even though I enjoy cooking, sometimes I want a night off. What do you do for healthier takeaway choices? Do you get takeaway or eat out at a restaurant? Do you avoid takeaway at all costs?

This post was not sponsored by Livestrong.com, but is purely my opinions after using the site for a little over a week.