Guest Author - Jeff Dillon

How To Keep Your Nutrition Intake High Every Time You Hike
By Guest writer Jeff Dillon, Foodcount.com designer

You’re an athlete trying to lose just a few extra pounds or maybe trying to track your carb to protein to fat ratio. Whatever the case, you’re busy training, eating, sleeping and probably working and don’t have much time for the details. You eat on instinct, skip the donuts, heavy on the veggies...or at least you try.

The fact is that most people, including athletes, don’t really know what they are fueling their body with. The key to optimal performance is ensuring that our body has the necessary nutrients it needs to repair and build muscle. Chips and sodas add up. Restaurant meal portions are huge. Many athletes may need more protein and carbohydrates during certain phases of their training. Knowing what foods have high protein and low carbs will help you tailor your diet.

Have you ever found yourself in one of those calorie-counting kicks? You buy a book loaded with the nutrient content for thousands of foods and with your pocket calculator and try tracking your diet for a few days...tedious. Finding the correct category, estimating you portion size and doing the math, every day is an extra 30 minutes you could have had your heart rate up. And the worst part is that it takes that long each day.

Since there are hoard of nutrition-related sites on the net, the trick is picking through the sour grapes. The criteria being, a site that is easy to use, with a large database of foods that will save my choices for me day after day. Voila, Foodcount.com!

Not cluttered with advertising or information peripheral to being an excellent diet analysis tool, FoodCount.com was born from a personal vendetta against calorie-counting books and tracks more than 40 macro-nutrients and vitamins including calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, sodium, fiber etc. The books track only 6 nutrients. FoodCount.com contains thousands of portion sizes, from small, medium and large bananas to every size of soft drink available, brand names and common foods. Best of all, FoodCount.com does the math with just a click.

After spending about 20 minutes setting up your account, the next time you login, FoodCount.com will remember you and store your diet history and your favorite foods, making it simple analyze you diet over time. You can even print graphical reports that show your intake of different nutrients compared to the RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance).

The bottom line is time and the value; although the service costs $19.95 per year, free trial memberships are available - you won't find a better diet analysis tool on the Internet.