Do you know how many calories you eat in a day? You may have a general idea, but have you ever actually added it all up? If you’re anything like me, you’d be surprised by how quickly it all adds up.

Anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight knows that it’s not easy to stick to it. It’s very easy to cheat “just a little” and wind up eating way more than intended on any given day. I have found that my number one weapon is accountability. For some people, it’s weekly weigh ins, for others, it’s the buddy system. But for me, it’s self-accountability in the form of a daily food diary.

Even when I’m not actively trying to lose weight, accountability is a must. Whenever I get lazy and stop tracking my daily food intake, the pounds inevitably start to creep back. Even when I think that I’m not getting that far off track, the scale reveals the truth.

Thankfully, the internet has made it SO much easier. There are a number of websites that do all the hard work for you. Just type in what you’ve eaten, and they search through a vast database of foods (even packaged foods and restaurant meals) and return the relevant results. If it’s an uncommon food that’s not already in the database, you can “add a new food” and add to the database for future use. You can even create frequently eaten meals and recipes so you don’t have to manually keep reentering the individual foods or ingredients.

Two of my favorite sites are:

• My Calorie Counter
• Nutrition Data

I use My Calorie Counter to track my daily food intake, but I use Nutrition Data for calculating nutrition data for my recipes (see the handy little nutrition labels that I use in my recipe posts… ).

Any similar sites that you find useful? Let me know!