How to Gauge Your Exercise Breakdown on The Daily Plate

The Web site the Daily Plate is a great tool for anyone trying to keep track of what they eat when trying to lose weight or maintain weight loss. The Daily Plate contains nutritional information for millions of foods, from fast food chains to grocery store items. It will count calories and calculate your nutritional information for the day, such as your sodium and protein intake. Simply type the food you've eaten into the search box, click on the food you've eaten in the search results and click on the green box to add the food to your daily plate. You can also use the site to calculate how many calories you burn when you exercise.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Computer
• Internet access

Log on to The Daily Plate

1. Open the Internet on your computer and go to www.thedailyplate.com. Log into your account if you have one.

2. Type your exercise activity into the search box, right where you'd type the name of a food you've eaten. For example, if you want to calculate how many calories you burned during a 30-minute run, type "running" in the search box.

3. Next, choose the activity from the search results that most accurately describes your workout. For instance, if your 30 minute run was at 5 mph, click on "Running - 5 mph" in the search results. Click the green box that says "I did this!" to add the activity to your daily plate.

4. When you click the green box, another box will appear for you to enter the time you spent on your exercise activity. Using the above example, you'd enter 30 minutes. You can also enter your heart rate and distance run to make your calorie count even more accurate. These fields are not required, but you can enter them if you'd like. Click "Save and Calculate" to add the exercise to your daily plate for the day.

Tips & Warnings

• The Daily Plate lets you track conventional exercise as well as daily activities you do every day, such as child care, vacuuming or pushing a stroller. So, be sure to give yourself credit for the calories you burn cutting the lawn and walking the dog. You don't have to sign up for an account to track your calories, but having your own account lets you save your daily information so you can add to your list of activities or foods later in the day. It also lets you calculate the amount of calories you need for your specific weight loss goals based on your current weight, height, gender and age.
• When you enter your daily exercise, the calories burned in your workout are subtracted from the ones you've eaten on your daily plate Be careful not to snack away all the calories you burned with your exercise!