The Best Weight Loss/Healthy Living Site
on the Web!
Calorie King
Although I have never had a big struggle with weight, I seemed to have gained and lost the same 15 pounds over and over again throughout the years. I tried some radical diets like The Atkins Diet and I tried the prepackaged food diets like Jenny Craig At Home. Neither of these plans worked for me. I was very happy at Weight Watchers Online and lost the 15 pounds that didn’t want to leave me while at Weight Watchers. Once I was maintaining and at my goal weight, I left Weight Watchers and did fine. For a while. Old habits started creeping up and I wasn’t sure if I was eating was really low fat or just seemed like it. After all, a salad certainly can’t cause weight gain, can it? It can when it has cheese, bacon bits, and is soaked in fat laden dressing. Those are things that can throw anyone off track. A few years ago, I discovered Calorie King. At the time, it was a free site and offered similar tools as Weight Watchers (minus the points system) and I joined to maintain my weight and to learn more about healthy eating as well as to find the motivation to exercise, the missing link in my plan to stay slim and healthy as I age. At 40, I have to watch everything I eat and exercise to look and feel the way I did at 30.
Calorie King started charging a small fee a couple years ago after adding many new features to the site and today, the cost is $29.95 per year (Update: September, 2006: This price may have risen to slightly. You can check on their home page.). This is an amazing bargain for all of you out there who want to lose weight, maintain and eat healthier, or even gain weight. This is a full featured, extremely easy to navigate website with tools for everyone to get fit and eat right.
What Calorie King Is
Unlike many other internet based dietary sites, Calorie King is not for just those who want to lose weight, although there are many tools at your disposal to help you do just that. Calorie King is an educational, friendly site with a load of features designed to help you with your weight and fitness goals.
Getting Started
Once you join, you have a week to try the site out free. If you like it, you will be charged the $29.95. If not, you can cancel your membership and pay nothing.
To begin, you will answer a number of questions about your lifestyle, your weight and height, your body frame, age, gender, and other factors that help Calorie King to establish the correct calorie intake for you. You will also tell CK whether you want to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Taking everything you input into consideration, you will then be given an estimate of how many calories per day that you should consume to reach whatever goal you have set for yourself. Calorie King then sets up a chart for you, giving you the calories, fat, protein, and carbs that you should take in per day based on the Recommended Daily Allowances. You can choose to accept Calorie King’s suggestions or to alter them and set your own calorie and fat restrictions.
You can personalize the food tiers even more by inputting that you want a low carb diet or a special type such as one for diabetics.
You will also be encouraged to burn a certain number of calories per day and will be keeping track of calories burned through exercise.
You then will decide whether you want Calorie King to generate meal plans (you pick whether you want basic, mainly convenience, or a combination of convenience and recipes) or whether you prefer to make your own meals up as you go along. I never was one to follow a meal plan and rarely used the meal plan feature but it is an excellent tool for people on the go who don’t want to worry about what their meals will be. Just follow the plan and you’re all set.
After all that is established and you have picked a user name and password, you will download the best feature of all, the desktop food journal, and begin to reach your goals.
The Food Journal
Calorie King has one of the best features I have seen for dieters or those watching their calories. It is a desktop food journal. This small download enables you to log your daily intake of food, water, and exercise all at your desktop without logging in and out of the website. The food database is huge, allowing you to find thousands of different food items to log. If you can’t find the exact item you are looking for, you can input the information manually from the package, can, or label and store that information to use over again. There are dozens of exercises to choose from and you can also input your own exercises and calories burned per minute to use.
The journal logs what food you consumed, the quantity, calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, and fiber. You will also input how many glasses of water per day that you drink and your exercise for the day.
This is all extremely simple. You open the program on your desktop, find the food in list of different categories of foods, click on the correct item and add the food to whichever meal you are logging. If you can’t find the exact food you ate, as I said, you can always input your own information to be stored for use again and again.
Fast foods and restaurants are represented and just about any fast food place you can imagine is in the database. It is frightening to see the calories and fat that some of these fast food items contain and, if you are like me, you will find yourself looking up the values of the foods you are thinking of eating before actually eating them to be sure they fit into your calorie and fat limitations.
As you log your food, there is a small bar graph at the bottom of the journal that fills up with green heading toward the maximum amount of calories you should have in a day. There is also a running tally of how much fat, protein, carbohydrates, and fiber you have taken in and how much more you have left to reach your daily goal. When you exceed your calorie limit, the green line turns red. You will soon become an expert at keeping your food intake within the green. Red lines are bad, green lines are very good!
When you log your exercise, Calorie King subtracts the total calories burned from your overall daily calorie intake.
One click and the info you put in is uploaded to the CK website. You never have to go to the actual site if you don’t want to but, with all the wonderful features on the site, it would be a shame not to and check them all out.
The journal is far more than just a logging tool, however. You can weigh in at any time by clicking on the scale icon and inputting your weight. You can chose to upload your weight to the site or keep it for your own personal knowledge. You can access charts that show you breakdowns of percentages of fat, calories and carbs you have eaten for one day and for a week. You can also access through the journal, bar graphs showing you a load of nutritional info. The last icon is the one that will automatically take to you the Calorie King website where there is an abundance of tools at your disposal.
The Social Features on the Site
Calorie King offers their members many tools to help them along their way to their individual goals.
First, they have journals where you can log your daily thoughts, eating habits, whatever. Many people, including myself, use these journals like blogs, posting whatever is on their minds, not just food, weight, exercise related topics. Calorie King believes there is a strong link to emotions and eating/staying healthy and they do focus on keeping you emotionally fit as well as physically, an aspect that is often overlooked on other weight loss sites. You can choose whether to keep your journal private or open to the public. If it is open to the public anyone can read it and members can send you a private message to your personal CK inbox. I keep my journal open and I have gotten such amazing support from people I don’t even know whenever they felt I needed it — about my ongoing struggle with trying to stay on an exercise plan to whatever my daily life dishes up.
Along with the journal, you can post a profile which tells a bit about you and also can accommodate a before and after photo. You can change photos as often as you like to represent where you are in your weight loss/fitness goal. There is also an option to post "your story" which is just that: Why you are at Calorie King and anything you want members to know about you. This is a great way for others to get to know you and what your goals are. I find reading people’s stories to be motivating since so many have overcome so much to get to where they are.
There is a large forum area where you can post messages about just about every topic you can imagine from emotional eating, exercise, losing large amounts of weight, maintaining, gaining weight, and member challenges. If the topic isn’t already there, start it! The forums are friendly and the posters are very supportive and understanding. I don’t post often due to time restrictions but have read some posts and have replied to those I felt could benefit from what I had to say. Many members post daily and enjoy the forums as a social outlet.
Calorie King also has a real time chat room open to all members 24/7. There are weekly scheduled chats, but other than those times, you can wander in and see who is in the room and chat away. I haven’t used the room much because, again, I am pressed for time but many friendships have been forged in that room.
The Informational Features on the Site
There is a wide array of informational features on Calorie King. To avoid this review turning into a novel, I will list the many features but won’t go into much detail about each and every one:
* Health Diary – You can input your blood pressure, blood sugar, and any other pertinent health related info to be stored.
* Shopping List – If you have chosen to have CK plan your week’s meals, you will get a list of foods and amounts that you need for the week. Print out your list and go shopping and you’ll be all set for the next week with no guesswork and no worrying about what to eat when mealtime comes.
* Food Database/Food Updates – Here you will find more food listings than in the desktop journal and new additions that are not yet in the journal.
* Recipes – This is a plethora of recipes of all kinds to help you keep eating fun and tasty while cutting back on calories and fat.
* Library – Here you find reading material to educate you on eating right, weight control, exercise, healthy living and more.
* University – For those very motivated, there is a 13 week course on healthy eating, eating triggers, and more that you can take. After each lesson, you will take a short test. If you pass, you move on to the next week. At the end of the 13 weeks, you will take a comprehensive open book test. If you pass with an 80% or higher, you receive a Calorie King Diploma to print out and a crown next to your name whenever any member looks you up in the database or reads your journal. I have my crown!! For those who really want to understand why they overeat and what foods are healthy and what foods just appear that way, as well as proper portions and the like, this is a great way to educate yourself and to learn rather than blindly following a premade diet, losing weight, then gaining it all back when you’re on your own.
* Community – This is where you will find the public journals, forums, live chat, and all social aspects of the site.
* Shop – Calorie Kings sells some several items from blood pressure monitors to magnets. The books section is the best and I encourage anyone who wants to know the calorie/fat/carb/ make up of any food to pick up "The Doctor’s Pocket Calorie, Fat & Carbohydrate Counter 2005 Edition". This gem has 11,000 foods listed and data for over 200 fast food restaurants and chains. The cost? $7.00. It’s a bible to many who are counting calories and fat and is small enough to carry in your bag or pocket. You don’t need to be a member to buy from the CK shop.
* Software – Here you will find software for your Palm Pilot, Pocket PC, and more.
* Tools – A myriad of tools for you to use. Learn what your Body Mass Index (BMI) is, your target heart rate, your hip to waist ratio, calculate exercise calories, and much more.
* Weekly Calorie King Newsletter – If you opt to receive the weekly CK newsletter via email, you will have access to the latest breathoughs in weight loss and fitness, informative articles, and new additions to the site or the food databse.
My Experience
I use the desktop journal every day and haven’t missed a day in a couple years. I am at my goal weight but I like to see how much fat I am consuming and how many calories I am eating. I also find being accountable to my journal makes me exercise on days I feel like slacking off because I want to be able to log that exercise in. I write in my public journal every day. Some days, I only talk about food and exercise and changes I would like to make. Other days, I get into everything that is in my head and let my emotions run wild. I don’t worry about who is reading and I don’t know who is reading. Sometimes, I will get a letter in my private inbox from someone I don’t know who happens across my journal giving me advice or support. I have never yet had a nasty private message sent to me and I have been very open about my opinions on things totally unrelated to food.
As I said, I rarely post on the message boards but do enjoy reading them when I can. I have used the chat room a few times but am too busy to be in there long. I completed my 13-week course and got my spiffy crown and I feel very much a part of the community. I wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t catch up on some people’s journals, some of whom are my good friends, some of whom don’t even know I read their journals and am rooting for their success.
Since joining Calorie King, I have maintained my weight give or take a couple pounds above or below what I consider my perfect weight and have lowered my cholesterol from 211 to 177. That is a huge feat since my entire family has amazingly high cholesterol levels and most of my family members are on cholesterol lowering medication. I have made new friends, learned more than I thought I would ever know about fast foods and their negative impact on our bodies, and I have found exercise buddies to help keep me motivated and, hopefully, I do the same for them.
For under $30 a year, Calorie King is a steal. It has more features than many more expensive sites and is easy to navigate and to use right away. The members are helpful and, if you’re ever in a rut or a bind and don’t know what to do about an eating habit, an exercise plan, or anything else, a post on the message boards will bring you insight and the support you need. The journal has been cathartic for me and find myself being more open there than anywhere else. I just renewed my membership even though my current one doesn’t expire until June. I know I want to be at Calorie King indefinitely.
Although I am not actively trying to lose weight, I am actively trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to continue on my quest for fitness and Calorie King is there to help me do that.
If you want to lose weight like the majority of members, there is all kinds of help for you there. You will get enough structure by following the redesigned food plans to get started but you will also get enough education so that you can change from dieting to a healthy eating style for life, not just as a temporary fix.
The Bottom Line
Do I recommend Calorie King? You bet I do! I think it is one of the very best weight loss/healthy living websites on the net today. The cost is so much less expensive than other more famous weight loss sites, but the features are as good or better than the competition. Try it for a week, free. See for yourself all the features I have described. Try out the message boards and look over the public journals. These are people just like you and me who are all there to reach their goals and who will celebrate with you when you do and will be there for you when you stray. You don’t have to be social and share anything with anyone if you choose not to. That’s your option. You can be as invisible as you want to be depending on your individual preferences.
The desktop food journal alone is worth the $30 a year. It’s incredible and it is so fast and easy to use. You won’t have any excuses to miss logging in your food and exercise as well as logging in your weight with the desktop journal sitting there waiting for you.
I give Calorie King the highest recommendation and rating that can be given based on cost, features, and overall ease of use.
How to Get There
Log on to Calorie King and take a tour. There are a lot of things you can do for free there to test it out. If you like what you see, sign up for a free week. You have nothing to lose — but weight and self-doubt. You have everything to gain by becoming part of a community that really fits your lifestyle and changes your habits rather than giving you a diet to lose weight but no skills to keep the weight off once you have reached your goal.
Recommended:
Yes
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