Folks: I found a great app that helps track your diet and exercise: "my fitness pal." If you have a smartphone, look it up in the App storage or the market. Or - you can log in food here:
Free Calorie Counter, Diet & Exercise Journal | MyFitnessPal.com.
You input your age, weight, height and target weight and it calculates how many calories you need to eat per day.
With a smartphone, if you are eating packaged foods, you have the option of simply scanning the barcode - it will automatically bring up the nutritional information for the food, and then you can simply add that food to your daily food consumption.
It also also allows you to input all sorts of exercises.
If you burn calories via exercise, it will augment your daily caloric intake accordingly.
In the past, when Mrs. Z-man would ask me to log my food intake, I would loathe doing it. But this app makes it very easy to keep a food log - and it gives you tons of nuturion info as well. (Summary page breaks down your consumption by fats, carbs, vitamins..etc. consumed).
At the end of the day, when you submit your final numbers, it will give you a message like, "If today is a typical day, you will loose X lbs in 5 weeks."
You can 'friend' people. It won't share your food diary, but it wil share if you are loosing weight, or came in under your daily carb allowance and other stuff like that.
I really like using it so far. Really helps me track my food.
-Z-man.