This semester in my Nutrition class, we had to track our food for four days, I went for five just to get a better feeling of my diet. Now we could either do it by hand, or we could use the "Super Tracker" that was developed with the USDA. I didn't want to have to carry paper around with me, and you can even asses the website on your phone, so I decided to use it.
The first thing you should know about the "Super Tracker" is that it's a very user friendly. It doesn't take much to be able to figure the website out. You can type your food into the Food Tracker that's under the "Track Food & Activity" tab, and put it under one of the four categories of either Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks. It'll then put the amount into a nice little bar graph to help you see the amount you've eaten that day.
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I'll use my results as an example. I think the most surprising thing for the first day was that I was really eating under all of the recommended amounts for myself. (Okay, almost all of them was a surprise, but the fruit being 0% wasn't. I despise most fruits unless they're in juice form.)
Here's Day 1:
Day 2:
A pretty typical day, I think the main reason I might have gone over in the blue column for dairy products was because I found this recipe for a yogurt breakfast smoothie that didn't have any fruit in it and I kinda jumped the gun and had a bit too much of them. Another awesome thing about the Super Tracker is that you can put your own recipes into it if you can't find a matching category for the food you ate.
The rest of my week was pretty similar to day 1, diet wise, and I found it pretty interesting. You can also do a bunch of other reports, that can show your nutrients or carbs, etc.
A few drawbacks, however, was that sometimes you have to guesstimate how much of the food you ate. Or, the website didn't have the type of food you ate. Like a fast food place or restaurants certain version of a dish. So, results could be a bit warped. Other then that, I would 10/10 recommend that anyone who wants to look at your diet shoudl try it out.
