Analyze Your Diet For Free!

I keep finding interesting websites as I procrastinate from studying so I might as well do something productive and share them with you guys! The EaTracker is a great tool provided by the Dietitians of Canada on their website for FREE that allows you to analyze your diet. You simply register (you won't get any annoying emails or have to pay for anything) input the food you ate that day and the serving sizes and they provide you with a breakdown of the calories, fat, protein and carbohydrates that you consumed for the day! They also let you know if you are eating enough from all the food groups, as well as provide you with an evaluation of key nutrients in your diet and if you are getting enough, such as fibre, vitamin C, calcium etc. Based on your age, height and weight they will also give you an approximation of how many calories you should aim to consume in a day, and there is an option to input your physical activities for the day. Overall I think it is a pretty useful tool if you are interested in seeing if you are getting enough or too much of certain nutrients and for analyzing your caloric intake for the day. 

The only drawback is the somewhat limited food choices that they provide you with to input into the tracker, but I just choose foods that are similar to the ones I ate. For example I had a bowl of Vector cereal in the morning and chose a cereal option that I felt was equivalent to it. The tool is not 100% accurate, and you shouldn't get too upset if you are way under or over on certain nutrients as our diets vary from day to day. As long as overall you are eating a balanced and varied diet you are probably consuming most of the essential nutrients you need at some point throughout the week. 

This is also a good tool to understand the concept of serving size, which many people struggle with. In North America we have become accustomed to believing that one serving size is much larger than it actually is/should be. We believe that one serving of pasta is about enough to fill our entire plate because that is what we are given at a restaurant. In reality, the Canada's Food Guide suggests that one serving of grain products such as pasta is about 1/2 a cup. Next time you make pasta measure out 1/2 a cup and you will be quite surprised how little it seems to be! We tend to believe we need to eat far more than our body actually requires, and therefore end up consuming more calories than we need. I suggest keeping a food diary for a week and trying to input everything you eat in a day into the EaTracker to see how your diet compares to what is recommended by the Dietitians of Canada. I promise you will look at food in a whole new way! You can find the link to the EaTracker HERE, or go to the Dietitians of Canada website and click on the eat well live well link.