Webware

I wish I could say that Diet.com's new Nutrition on the Go service only appeals to obsessive health nuts. But if that's true, then I am one. I was pretty excited about the possibilities...until I tried it.

The concept is pretty simple: You text the name of a restaurant and the menu item you're interested in to DIET1, or 34381. In theory, the site returns the nutritional information for the food you entered, including calories, fat, carbohydrates, and protein. If you're doing Weight Watchers, you can add "Points" or even "pts" to your query and get the Weight Watchers rating, as well.

Nutrition on the Go is a great idea--who hasn't wondered just how bad that burrito (you know, the one the size of a newborn baby?) could possibly be. This is the kind of service that can actually head off that horrible mistake before it happens. That's why it's such a bummer that the database seems, at least right now, pretty limited. Worse, it's limited to restaurants that are patently bad for you! Nutrition To Go works like a charm if you're only looking for nutritional information for McDonald's, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, or Burger King. Now, you tell me: How often are the patrons of McDonald's, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A and Burger King looking for precise nutritional data before they order? The service does have Starbucks, which is a coup, and which you should know can be really, really bad for you. Consider their press release example:

Starbuck's White Hot Chocolate - No Whip (nonfat Milk) Grande Cals: 480, Fat: 18g, Carb: 63g, Prt: 17g

Ouch. But I searched for a Chipotle burrito, and even though Chipotle is owned by McDonald's, I got nothing. I searched for "Applebees buffalo wings" and also got no results. I wasn't trying to trick the service, I can understand why it might, for example, only have information on chain restaurants, but I thought those two were pretty common.

Now, to be fair, when Nutrition on the Go works, it works, but it's best to be precise. I queried "Taco Bell taco" and got back: Taco Bell Taco Salad with Salsa and Shell (Calories 790; Fat 42g; Carb 73g; Protein 31g). When I sent "Taco Bell soft taco," I got back the complete specs for a beef soft taco (210 calories, 10 grams of fat, 21 grams of carbohydrates, and 10 grams of protein).

Overall, I can see loving Nutrition on the Go if the database is filled out a bit more. Currently, the site says it offers "over [sic] 36,000 foods from 1,700 restaurants in North America." If that's the case, I suggest an alphabetical or even regional list of the restaurants, just so I could scan it for the ones I go to often. That would save me both frustration and pounds. After all, I know that a Chipotle carnitas burrito isn't the best choice I could make this week, but I don't know know. Save me from myself, Diet.com!

My New Year's resolutions for 2007 were largely a flop, although I did frame and hang some vintage 1930s cruise ship menus as promised.

But if you're dead set on changing your life in 2008, many Web sites can assist with tallying and tracking resolutions. Some will continue to ping you with reminders, or even enlist other folks to pester you over the next 12 months. Facebook users can pick from various third-party widgets for setting and sharing goals, but other sites offer more customization.

Sweet and simple, Joe's Goals help you log progress on to-do items within a simple calendar. Just add a check mark to stuff that's done. You can show off your score card to others with badges for MySpace or your blog.

LifeTango's brainstorm wizard steps you through the goal-setting process, nicely leaving each item private by default. You can also send items on your list to friends, family, or the general public. The site functions well, but its orange and blue tones could use a makeover, and there's not much to do off the site.

43Things makes it quick to get started by typing in a goal and seeing, for instance, that 3,885 other people have pledged to "exercise more." You can post 43Things items to or from a blog. The site has removed its groups, which had become a target for spammers. But users can cheer each other, or pay $1 for a SuperCheer.

To pass the buck and the blame, 43Things' Should Do This tool lets you make suggestions about what the rest of the world, anyone or anything from Al Gore to poor people to Fox News, should do.

Remember the Milk beta makes your to-do items and reminders available in Gmail, via SMS, the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices, Skype, and popular IM clients. Integration with Google Calendar and contacts would let you connect to, say, a co-worker for an instant chat at an appointed time. Remember the Milk also can pinpoint tasks on a map and export your lists as Atom and iCal-ready feeds.

I find that Remember the Milk is the most portable goal-setting service of the bunch; you can take it with you instead of repeatedly returning to its Web site. Still, it would be nice to see such services import to-do items from software such as Microsoft Outlook.

For even less complication, Hassle Me simply sends you a nagging e-mail or IM nudge for any goal and time interval you pick.

Work that body
In poll after poll, Americans name eating less and exercising more as top goals for the new year. But who wants to count calories? Just tell Fit Day or The Daily Plate what you're eating, and they'll do the work, drawing charts of the nutrition you're getting or should be.

DietTelevision beta (more here) does the same, adding motivational videos alongside personal recipes suggestions with shopping lists. You can track food and water intake by texting the site from a mobile phone.

Traineo also helps you track a diet and workout plan, joining groups or calling upon four personal "motivators" to keep you on track. I like that you can rate your daily diet from poor to great if you're in a hurry and don't want to log every bite. However, some groups seem to be sponsored by diet products.

The Revolution Health portal (more here) launched Resolution 2.0, a tool for setting goals with a group that include working out more, being a better parent, and complaining less. Professionals, including personal trainers and doctors, lead the groups.

Like the general goal-making services, these fitness sites offer plenty of tools, but I'd like them to do a better job taking you off of their pages by integrating with more third-party calendars, e-mail services, and mobile devices.

Overall, I prefer FitDay's tight interface and quick setup. Daily Plate made me first skip an offer for a paid subscription, and then sent my password in a clear text e-mail. I just wish that FitDay listed more common consumables, like pad thai, so I don't have to look up peanuts and noodles separately. Daily Plate lists pad thai and other takeout staples of my diet.

If you need extra help with becoming well, more than 500 online support groups at DailyStrength aim to tackle tough problems such as substance abuse and disease.

Cutting carbons
If going green is on your wish list, Make Me Sustainable (more here), and Yahoo Green (more here) help to set goals, such as swapping out old light bulbs and toting reusable bags to the grocery store. Carbon Rally (more here) adds peer pressure to the mix by encouraging teams of users to compete.

A new diet site and social network is launching this week: DietTelevison. It looks like a good resource for people trying to lose weight. It has a ton of diet-related information, as well as a social network to give dieters a support group.

As an information source, it's very rich. You select your tolerance for various diet aspects (your affection for bread or for meat; your preference for affordable or restaurant-friendly plans, for example), and the site then gives you a list of diets that matches your wishes. While the site doesn't have arrangements with the people who run the big diet programs (like Atkins or Weight Watchers), it will display them as options, and give you meal plans that are supposed to match their guidelines.

Users can track their intake by typing their meals into the site. There's also supposed to be a voice-recognition system you can call in to report on your meals, although for the life of me I couldn't find the call-in number on the site. (Personally, I would prefer Nutrax's cameraphone recording system.)

The site can advise you on exercise in much the same way: You tell it what you want to do (choices include variations on working out, running, and activities such as yoga), and it will come up with a list of weekly exercises for you. However, for selecting a diet plan, the system doesn't take your preferred physical activity level into account. That looks like an oversight to me.

And there's a big social angle: you can find people with similar goals and support each other (although when you first connect to the support system, the way it shows photos of other members makes it feel more like a dating service that a support network). You also get badges for various things, such as being a parent, losing 5 pounds, loving junk food, and so on. Users can also award badges to others.

The service has a lot of information on it and is cleanly organized. My only concern--and I only used the system for a few minutes so I may be wrong--is that there is so much information that DietTelevision tries to collect and manage that users might find it overwhelming.

But I think this could be a great research tool for finding diet plans. I really like how the system ranks plans based on what you like to eat.

See also: Traineo, Gimme20 (review), and The Daily Plate, among others.

They say keeping track of the food you eat is one of the necessities of dieting. But who has time (or wherewithal) to keep a log? Health Magazine has a clever tip: Use your camera phone to snap and e-mail pictures of the meals you eat.

Better yet, Health says, sign up for Nutrax, a online service to which you send pictures of your meals as you go through your day. Later, when you sit down at your computer, you can identify the foods eaten in your pictures. The service tracks the calories, carbs, and nutrients against your goals. Goals can be set based on different diet regimes, like low fat or low carbohydrate.

Then you can slice your data several ways: You can see a table, which looks much like a food-nutrition label, for a meal or a day. There's also a dashboard showing several personal stats (calories, weight, exercise, etc.) Or the system can show you the pictures of meals you've eaten that were high in fat, eaten late at night, etc.

You can also use the service to track exercise (by photographing your running trail or weight bench).

That's the free service. The paid service, for $8 a week, adds a personal touch: You get a personal dietitian to work with you to develop a plan, and to watch as you upload photos in real time and, if necessary, give you feedback when you need it, presumably by SMS.

To this I say: Yikes. I'll stick with the free, non-Big Brother version, thank you.

There are other diet trackers out there, but Nutrax is nicely executed, and the camera phone integration is very clever.

See also my favorite pictures-of-food site, AirlineMeals.net.