Health Tip of the Week: Online food/exercise logs - to use or not to use?

In the quest to get healthy and meet health related goals, a lot of people have started logging their workouts or counting their calories using online exercise journals and caloric intake/expenditure calculators.  My girlfriend recently started using one herself, so of course I was skeptical (since I'm skeptical of just about everything) and had to investigate.  I will go through the pros and cons of such web sites by going over a few features of the food and exercise logs and calculators on http://www.livestrong.com/, as this is the one my girlfriend has been using and I have gone through with her.

Pros:

• It helps you meet goals you set: My girlfriend's main goal is simply to lose weight.  Putting her age, height, and current weight into a calculator on the web site gave her Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR, which is the number of calories you burn simply from existing.  Then she picked her goal of losing one pound per week (which is a great goal, as it is healthy and realistic!).  Based on her BMR and her weight loss goal, she is given a target number of calories to consume each day to meet her goal.
• Calorie counting: The MyPlate feature of livestrong.com lets you enter the food you ate and tells you how many calories you get from carbohydrates, fats, and protein in that food. This makes counting the calories you consume through the day very quick and simple.  It also lets you see how much food (and how much of which foods) you ate, which helps you spot if you are eating too much of one thing or not enough of another.  You can even track how much water you drink throughout the day!
• Logging your exercise: The same feature on the livestrong web site lets you input what kind of exercise you did that day, and how long you did it for.  You can also input general physical activity, like gardening.  It then tells you how many calories you expended doing those activities.  This allows you to track your exercise and physical activity to see how much you really do from day to day.
• Showing the relationship between diet and exercise.  The coolest feature of the livestrong web site is that it calculates caloric intake from food and caloric expenditure from physical activity all at once.  It then shows you if you are over or under your goal for the day.  For instance, if your caloric intake goal is 1,500 calories a day, and you consume 1,700 calories but burn 300 calories throughout the day, your net caloric intake is 1,400 calories, and you have met your goal!  This is a great visual representation of how it takes BOTH diet and exercise to lose weight (or meet any fitness goal).

Cons:

• Body composition doesn't seem to be addressed. I didn't find anything on how much of your body is fat weight vs. lean weight (which is bones, muscle, skin, everything on your body other than fat.)  While there is no good way to assess one's body composition without using equipment in person, it would be good to at least have a mention of it somewhere.  When trying to lose weight, losing fat is good - losing bone, muscle, or fluid, however, is not!
• The numbers are not 100% accurate. It's necessary to measure exact serving sizes to get an accurate caloric measure of the food you eat, which most people don't do.  Same thing with exercise - its possible that even two people of the same size can expend a different amount of calories when doing the exact same exercise.  This is not to say that the numbers are wildly off-base, as most of them give you a general idea of what you have eaten or expended.  Just not an exact amount.

So are they good to use or should I not bother?
I think online journals and logs like this are great tools for someone who is just starting out exercising or changing their eating habits.  They let you visually see what you eat, what you don't eat, and how much exercise you do or don't do.  This is a great tool to have when trying to make lifestyle changes.  People simply need to keep in mind that when losing weight, they should try to focus on losing excess mass (fat) and not lean mass (bone and muscle).  The numbers from these sites also shouldn't be taken too literally, as they will never be 100% accurate.  But they can be very good guidelines that can set you on the right path to your fitness goals.

Meeting fitness goals is much easier if you can SEE what you are doing each day, and online logs make that convenient and easy to do.