My Fitness Pal

My wife Lucinda has recently been diagnosed with high cholesterol and that sucks because I want her to live long enough for me to torture her in her old age :) She has been given a prescription for a cholesterol med and she refuses to become dependent on cholesterol meds.

Lucinda is beautiful, active, relatively healthy, and has a smokin ass :) We jog regularly, do some weight training, yoga occasionally, and enjoy a fairly active life. She (and by she I mean we) just need to get our diets in order.

I weigh 172 and Lucinda weighs 154. Neither of us is obese or what I would call heavily over weight. I could stand to loose about 15 pounds and Lucinda has her goals as well. We were once members of weight watchers but found that we didn't like the tools or the interface, or the recurring charges.

When we received the news about her high cholesterol, we decided to pay more attention to our diets, and to try to find a free tool to help us track our intake. Lucinda asked me to try to find an iphone app that would help her track her daily cholesterol intake. She wants to keep her daily intake to under 300mg of cholesterol daily. I was up to the challenge and began searching online and on my iphone. I found a few cholesterol trackers, but they were tools to actually track the ldl and hdl numbers and didn't really monitor the intake.

I finally stumbled upon http://www.myfitnesspal.com. Myfitnesspal is a free tool that has a very impressive array of tools for anyone looking to track their daily intake for the purpose of losing weight, lowering cholesterol, or any other thing they need to track. The screen shot below is my food diary;

There is a very comprehensive food database, exercise tracking tool, support forums, blogs, it is just a fantastic tool. The website automatically syncs with your iphone (assuming you have one) and you can track stuff on the fly with the phone. It also connects with your facebook page, your twitter account, and gives you neat little badges you can post on other websites to show your progress (I probably won't ever use any of those). Did I mention it was free?

We have a few months to get her cholesterol down and try to get her off her meds. We are also trying to get into our bathing suit bodies because we own some panama city beach condo rentals and spend a lot of time on the beach.

Check out myfitnesspal if you are looking for an alternative to weight watchers paid services. This one is definitely worth the look.

Update: They have an app for Droid and have an application for Blackberry in development.