In this article, let us look at two online guides to check your illness symptoms online, which are extremely easy to use and provide information about probable causes.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to stress that these guides should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. It is better that you use these tools as a supplementary resource to get more information, while you may be waiting for your doctor’s appointment, or to learn more about certain illnesses.

Check Symptoms Online With WebMD Symptom Checker

Web MD Symptom Checker is an easy to use interactive tool, where you select specific symptoms and it identifies possible causes.

You start by selecting your gender and age, after which you can specify the symptoms in three ways in the left panel:

• You can identify the symptom by zooming in on the affected body part in the interactive map of the human body on the left.
• You can select from a list of 76 possible symptoms organized in an alphabetical list and a common symptoms list.
• You can search for symptoms using the search box.

If applicable, you can select and add more symptoms. Once you identify the symptoms, the Symptom Checker shows you a list of possible conditions that may be the cause of them. You can check more about any possible condition right within the Symptom Checker.

For each condition, Symptom Checker provides you with an overview, a list of all symptoms associated with that condition, and related articles and videos on the WebMD website.

Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker

Use this guide to discover the most common causes of the most common symptoms. The Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker takes a different approach to isolating possible conditions than the WebMD version.

You first select between Adult and Child symptoms on the first page. For Adults, there are 28 common symptoms listed. After you choose one kind of symptom, the next page lets you select related factors depending upon the selected symptom:

• Details such as persistent/intermittent, started suddenly/gradually, etc.
• Whether it affects both pairs of hands/legs/etc.
• Details of the pain – duration, pattern, severity, location
• Trigger factors such as injury, repetitive use, stress, change in sleeping pattern, etc.
• Relieving factors such as medication, rest
• Accompanying symptoms associated with the selected symptom

Note that this page is specific and different for each of the 28 symptoms listed in the first page. The questions on this page are similar to what a doctor would ask you after you tell him about a symptom. So the process actually feels similar to an actual diagnosis!

After you make the appropriate selections on this page, the next one gives you possible causes of the symptoms. Here, you can see all associated factors or symptoms related to this condition.

Clicking on the condition takes you to the main page for it on the Mayo Clinic website. Here, you will find a wealth of information and resources such as description, causes, risk factors, tests and diagnosis, treatment and drugs, home and alternative remedies, prevention, etc.

For more health-related articles, check out our health category.

Did you find these tools useful? Any other online illness guide that you prefer? Tell us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• The Best Reference Sites For Medical Students (33)
• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)

Sleep disorders, behavior disorders, obesity, diabetes and so many other ailments produce physical pains and emotional reactions that many doctors can predict, but which most of us lack the medical training or expertise to understand. This is why, especially if you’re caring for someone who is mentally or physically ill, it’s so important to track and monitor health factors such as weight fluctuations, mood swings, sleep problems and more.

As the Earth gradually drifts further from the sun and the daylight hours begin to shrink, I would like to focus on an important online resource I discovered that can help you create a mental and physical fitness log to monitor and predict physical and emotional problems and get yourself or someone you love the help that they need before it’s too late.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of living a healthy life, which is why we’ve offered a number of articles with geeky resources that might help, such as the miVitals online system to store and share your medical information, Trusera – a health information social network, and iMedix – a health search engine. The application I’m going to cover today is an excellent online community called MedHelp, which offers a wonderful library of “trackers,” which are tools that can help you monitor every aspect of your health that you might be concerned about.

Tracking Your Mood With a Mental Fitness Log

MedHelp is a health conscious online community that, according to the website, has over 8 million members. The social community itself would require an article all of its own to review, but what I’d like to focus on are the free tools offered for free when you sign up that allow you to log dozens of mental and physical fitness factors. Having some personal experiences in the mental health field, there’s one particular tracker that I found extremely valuable and an excellent resource for anyone suffering from depression or other mood disorder – a mood tracker.

When you click on one of the mood trackers on the main MedHelp page and provide your sign-up information, you’re immediately presented the page where you can modify the particular tracker that you chose. You can customize the tracker depending what type it is.

You can set the tracker to be your own mental or physical fitness log or someone else’s that your monitoring, and you can also make it public – either to just specific friends or completely open to the world (it’s surprising how many people are willing to share their personal logs. You can configure the tracker to remind you to update your mood tracker daily, weekly or monthly (or never), and finally, you can set it so that it’s customized for a particular mood disorder such as major depressive or bipolar.

The major chart area is where you click to insert your log entries, and you can scroll from month to month so that you can see the history.

On your profile page, you’ll notice the community features on the menu bar at the top. You can add friends (or family) who can view your charts, add private or public journal entries, notes, photos and of course post to various message boards about health issues. When it comes to health, having a community to ask questions and share experiences is absolutely invaluable – especially when you’re going through a major medical health crisis. There’s always someone out there who has suffered through the same thing.

When you click the “Manage” button  at the right of the top menu on your profile page, you can add additional trackers to your profile. When you enter this area, get ready to be shocked by the impressive number of tracker apps that are available, including ones to track addictions, anxiety and panic attacks, baby health, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches and migraines, ovulation and even weight and exercise trackers.

Back to the mood tracker example, when you add a new item to the chart, you can choose the update based on what you’re tracking. In this case you can update what your (or your family member’s) overall mood was that day. Not only can you track mood, but you can keep track of a whole assortment of symptoms and other signs that something might be going wrong.

The items mentioned on these menus and screens hint that a doctor or some other medical professional put them together because they really do hit on the items that are relevant to what you’re trying to track.

If you want, you can even type a journal entry for the day to note an event or a situation that you want to remember later on when doctors or anyone else asks what might have caused a condition to worsen. As you enter data every day, you’ll notice a trend line developing on the large chart at the top of the tracker.

While you’re entering in your daily information, little details that may seem inconsequential all get accumulated into the big picture and the tracker shows you, in a graphical format, how all of these things – events, medicine, mental state and physical state – all factor into your sense of well-being. For example, how the change in season and shorter days has a significant negative effect on your mood (so you should plan a fall vacation!)

The MedHelp library of trackers include such a variety of tools that you could use it even if you’re perfectly healthy and just want to start exercising and losing weight. There’s a weight tracker, diet tracker and an exercise tracker that can show you what exercises and food have the greatest impact on your weight and how. Here’s the summary data for an obese, 220 pound guy who sits on his chair all day writing articles (why are you assuming that’s me?)

You can set goals, monitor progress, and troubleshoot your own health with mental and physical fitness logs for every aspect of your life. You can analyze, with real information and real data from your daily life, what works and what doesn’t. By tweaking your daily life – removing what you learn has a negative effect and adding what you learn is positive – you can transform your physical and emotional well-being.

Which of the tracker tools look like they may help you? Do you use any other tools to track and analyze your health? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)
• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• How To Make Your Own Workout Music With The Right Beats (21)
• HEATLH: 2 Easy Guides to Check Your Illness Symptoms Online (2)

But before you order the protein supplements and pre-pay a three year membership to your local gym, you could try to start getting in shape by using the OneHundredPushups method. The pushup workout program is based around your regular standard old push-up, but as it turns out it’s quite a good exercise.

So what is OneHundredPushups? Actually it’s a very basic pushup workout program in which you do a fixed number of push-ups every other day for 6 weeks. In the end, you should be able to complete 100 push-ups in a row. It doesn’t really matter how fit you are beforehand, since you can follow certain tracks with more or less repetitions. If you’re able to do more than 20 push-ups during the initial test, you’re even allowed to skip to week 3 (Anyone? Start bragging in the comments).

The geeky part is that they have a really decent website with an explanation of the pushup workout program where you can keep track of your progress with the Pushup Logger and there is even an iPhone app (it isn’t free, link to iTunes Store here) that helps you reach your goal. Another cool thing is the printable schedule that you can fold into a mini booklet. They call this booklet a pocketmod and it can be found here.

So you’ve printed the booklet, signed up at the pushup logger and maybe even installed the iPhone app. Now it’s time to actually do something. You start out with an initial test that determines how fast you should start in the program. If you don’t manage more than 20 continuous push-ups you start at week 1. You will do three sessions of push-ups a week. You are supposed to reach the final week and do a hundred pushups after six weeks, but in reality you keep doing exhaustion tests that tell whether you should redo a week.

In my experience, it is a simple and easy to follow program. Of course you’re only doing one exercise, but I’ve found that it really trains many muscle groups. A good-form pushup is known to train almost all muscles of your upper body. I noticed my progress pretty fast, even though I already train (somewhat) in the gym. Especially when you stick to the rules and keep doing the push-ups three times a week you will see progress. I’m not sure everyone will reach the hundred continuous pushups, but you will see progress. I think when you really want to make a sincere effort of working on your health you should also start doing cardio workouts and pay attention to what you eat. This program is very good for beginners and others with limited free time because it only takes 30 minutes to an hour a week.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve started the OneHundredPushups pushup workout program. It helpt to share your results and goals with other people. You can also have a look at this Friendfeed group for instance. If it goes well you can also try the Two Hundred Situps program or Two Hundred Squats program. Good luck!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• How To Make Your Own Workout Music With The Right Beats (21)
• Gyminee – “Stay Motivated. Have Fun. Get Fit.” (1)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)

Now, I’ve gained some, but not all, back. I’ve become a little more serious lately and hope to work my way closer to my ideal weight again. As I’m about to doze off into a carb-induced coma, I realize why I’ve gained some of my weight back.

No matter the amount you want to lose, it can be very difficult. A “weight loss” search is likely to yield a myriad of websites trying to sell you gimmicks, pills, powders, or exercise equipment. You rarely find free weight loss sites that are actually free and helpful when it comes to weight loss.

After scouring the internet, here are some of the best free weight loss sites to help you on your weight loss journey. Remember to consult with a doctor before beginning any special diet or exercise regimen.

The Mayo Clinic weight loss website provides some basic, yet useful information. Count on this medically oriented site to guide you reasonably and safely on your journey. If you are a beginner, this is a key place to start. If you have hit a brick wall in your weight loss, this is a place to return to the basics. Sometimes just doing that will spur your weight loss once again.

WebMD has a Healthy Eating and Diet Center, which much like the Mayo site, provides doctor approved tips and tools. There are calculators, galore and a “Diets A-Z” section that includes the low-down on various diets like the Cookie Diet, the Atkins Diet, and the Cabbage Soup Diet (never mind that retching sound in the background – just gimme a sec).

A cool feature of this site is their free Food and Fitness Planner. You enter the basics and the Planner takes you step-by-step through providing a meal and exercise plan to reach your goals. The Planner’s settings only allow you to pick modest goals, but research has shown that slow weight loss equals longer term success.

As a huge (no pun intended) fan of “The Biggest Loser”, I am disappointed in their “official” site. It appears simply a sales and marketing tool. Almost any selection will take you to products you can buy. There are a few free resources, like an occasional recipe here and there, but nothing substantial. However, going to NBC’s Biggest Loser website will provide better results. The site has video, blogs, recipes, exercises and tips – all free!

If you think you need community motivation, try The Biggest Loser League. This is free to join, and requires a simple registration. Complete your profile, set your goals, and track your progress. There are League challenges that you can sign up for and earn points. You can set up your own individual challenges or form a team with family or friends and create challenges for the team. Points simply allow you to move up in rank in the League, but earning points may keep you losing weight. The variety introduced through the challenges will keep your journey fresh.

You can upload your photos, and view a weight loss time-line. The site’s targeted feature is that of creating community, or building a team. The added accountability of partners may be all you need for motivation.

Prevention Magazine is a Biggest Loser partner, so it’s no surprise that their sites are linked. However, Prevention itself offers some additional resources. The coolest thing I found was their Weight Loss Simulator for women. This offers a 3-D comparison of your “virtual” body now versus what you might look like when you lose weight.

You enter specifics about your body, including height, current and goal weight, and you can even change your avatar’s look. To save the profile you have to register with My Virtual Model, which is a free process. Since Prevention is primarily targeted for women, many of the tools, like the Simulator, are geared for women, but there are charts, calculators, food diaries, and many other free resources anyone can use.

Weight loss is about the basics – intake versus output; keep your online weight loss tools basic and you will see results! Remember, when using weight loss tools like calculators, be honest! You have to have a true assessment of where you are now to accurately measure results.

Which weight loss tools or free weight loss sites do you use to plan and track your diet progress? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit : jmacphoto.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone (6)

One of the first steps in being healthy is changing how you spend your time, which will include getting rid of some bad habits. For many, this will mean no more snacking on potato chips, popcorn or soda. For others, it means quitting smoking or consuming alcohol; and still others will have to do all three. Either way, Ryan recently found a website called Joes Goals and this is a good place to start if you’re trying to break a bad habit. He also wrote about the best workout websites that combine technology and fitness. Both these articles are great and I hope they will come in handy.

However, there’s another website dedicated to helping their community to lose weight and feel great – SparkPeople.

SparkPeople’s motto is “Lose Weight. Get Fit. Look and Feel Great!” and they have really done a fantastic job at developing a site that has multiple tools and features to help you achieve your weight loss goal! It has everything from:

• expert advice
• blogs
• weight calculators
• fitness videos
• meal planning
• custom workouts based on your goals

SparkPeople is a HUGE website so I suggest checking out the Getting Started Guide to learn how to use the site.

After you sign up, you will see the main area with three primary tools:

• Nutrition Tracker – create a menu and shopping list based on your goals.
• Fitness Tracker – create a workout based on your goals.
• Weigh-In – calculate your calorie and nutrient needs based on your weight loss.

Each of these tools is a link to various options and features. For example, when you click on the Fitness Tracker, you can view an auto-generated workout based on your goals. One of the nice features with SparkPeople is you can also watch a demo on how to do each exercise.

There is also a section where you can modify an auto-generated workout or create one from scratch.

Notice the screen shot above is just showing the exercise options based on “crunches”.  There is a plethora of exercise options based on selections, such as: upper body, lower body and core. Furthermore, each of those areas have beginner and advanced sections.

For those who are looking for expert tips and video workouts for the home or gym, SparkPeople has a free video section as well.

I have only skimmed the surface of what the SparkPeople website has to offer you on losing weight and feeling great. I have not yet started to get into the: blog, message board, receipes, teams and other SparkPeople tools; you can even create your own Sparks web page.

If you use SparkPeople and have a favorite section that I did not mention, please let us know. Also, if you use a different site to help you lose weight, share with us in the comments.

Image credit: N!el from Flickr

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)
• Gyminee – “Stay Motivated. Have Fun. Get Fit.” (1)
• Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone (6)
• How To Make Your Own Workout Music With The Right Beats (21)

However, in the end it really comes down to getting up in the morning with the motivation and inspiration to get out there and start moving. This summer, I’ve decided to take a different approach. While I’ve always had a good appreciation of the importance of physical fitness, I now realize that in order to motivate myself, I need to combine it with something that I really love – technology. Therefore, I offer MUO readers a brief list of the best workout websites that best combine technology and fitness.

The Importance of Physical Fitness as You Get Older

One of the more difficult things about getting older and having children and having a “real job” is that as life goes on, your spare time slips away. Your role as a father or mother and your day job consumes most of those precious 24 hours in a day. The remaining few hours go toward preparing and eating meals, cleaning your living area and sleep. There’s not a whole lot of time left over to go to the gym and work out.

One of the things that has always helped me get back around to exercising in the past is when I had a good plan, an efficient exercise regimen and an organized system. With all of those things in hand when you walk into the gym, you know that every second you spend in there will have the most significant impact on your body. For this reason, I’ve organized five of the best workout websites that make use of the technology of the Internet, as well as some pretty cool widgets and tools that make planning and tracking your workouts much easier.

Exercise TV – Exercise Videos On Demand

One of the things that recently got me excited again about the importance of physical fitness was an interview I conducted last month with Allison Wehrley, the Marketing Manager for Exercise TV.  The unique thing about ExerciseTV is that it’s almost exclusively dedicated to delivering high quality workout videos. The majority of the videos are free to watch online but if you want to download them so that you can have them with you at the gym, you’ll need to fork over two or three bucks. They also feature shows “on-demand” for cable television and there’s also an online community where you can get motivation from other folks like you.

While ExerciseTV isn’t an entirely free site, you can find enough free material to easily make it one of the more useful video workout resources and communities on the web.

Fitness Magazine – Create a Workout Video

The only thing better than being able to watch free workout videos on the net is the ability to customize a workout video to suit your specific needs. For the purpose of this article, I really didn’t want to focus on the standard exercise sites that everyone knows about, like Bodybuilding.com or Women’s Health, however Fitness Magazine earns a slot in the list of useful workout technologies by providing a unique tool called Create a Video Workout. I know, it’s not the most innovative title but the online tool is free and it’s also very useful.

After you sign up for a free account, you can select overall exercise categories like dumbell exercises, and then you can make the video target specific body parts or utilize only the exercise equipment that you have access to. You’re able to add one workout after another, customizing the length of your workout video to whatever you like. This customized video tool is one of the first online applications I’ve seen that actually allows users to create a video on the fly like this – a very cool feature for people who are looking for ways to target very specific parts of their body and don’t want to waste hours searching the net for the right exercise videos.

The American Council on Exercise

If there’s any organization that has the capacity to teach the importance of physical fitness, that would be the American Council on Exercise (ACE).  While it sounds like a government organization where you’d expect most of the content to be free, it’s actually a licensing organization for fitness trainers, so you can expect to find lots of certification materials and courses for sale. But the great thing about this website is that there is a great deal of free content including workout articles, videos and healthy recipes.

Obviously, if you’re interested in becoming a personal trainer, this is a great place to earn that certification through online courses. But as a resource for free workouts, this website easily makes the “best” list. You’ll find workouts for every category of exercise that you’re interested in.

FitByFun – The Truly Geeky Way to Workout

Want to know how a geek works out? They workout to a video game, of course. FitByFun attempts to do for the computer what the Wii has done for television, with an innovative and fun online game that you can workout to.

The Wii-like character on the screen moves her arms and legs using motions that you need to copy. As time goes on, the game displays how many calories you’ve burned during the workout as well as the elapsed time. The online fitness instructor gives you directions, and you can select the “instructor style” of the workout – which customizes whether feet or arms should move during the workout. For more advanced workouts, you should select dynamic feet and arms. If you break into a sweat just walking over to the refrigerator, you may want to consider starting out with only dynamic feet. The application even keeps track of your workout history so you can review your progress as time goes on.

Gyminee – Track Your Workouts, Nutrition and Weight

Gyminee is a very cool, free workout and nutritional information website. It offers the same things that most good workout websites offer, including video workouts, a recipe section where you can plan out healthy meals against your nutritional goals, and it even includes a social network with forums and a “GymBuddy” feature where you can find other folks who share your interests and goals. However, what really stands out is the “Locker Room,” which is a section where you can track your nutrition, workouts, and of course your weight.

While there are plenty of other sites out there that offer similar features, what really makes Gyminee stand out is that it focuses on both your exercise regimen as well as your nutritional progress and your weight. Combining all of these things together on one site makes staying healthy a whole lot easier and saves a lot of time.

How about some music to accompany your workout? Guy has written an article on how to make your own workout music. Check it out.

Do you use any online tools or websites to plan your workouts?  Share any resources that you know in the comments section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• Plan Walking Routes with Gmaps Pedometer (17)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)

The best way to lose abdominal weight, or even just to control your weight overall when you can’t seem to get much exercise, is through controlling your diet. However, keeping track of what you eat and the calories you consume can feel both overwhelming and annoying. Who wants to waste time jotting down the calories of every little snack or drink?

Being a geek who’s always interested in Internet resources that will do all of my work for me, naturally I decided to turn to the Internet for my weight loss needs. MakeUseOf has touched on weight loss solutions in the past, such as Tina’s article listing 6 cool sites to help you keep New Year’s resolutions in 2009 as well as a number of calorie and weight loss calculators.

Lose Weight for Free With the Daily Plate

If you perform a Google search for “how to lose weight,” you’ll get back an entire truckload of weight loss scams that will leave you as fat as ever. Why don’t diets work? Because, as any professional dietician will tell you, there’s no magic formula that’s going to make you magically lose weight. Physics still comes into play. As a biological creature, if you take in more energy (calories) than you expend, you’re gonna plump up like the Goodyear Blimp.

So what’s a body to do? It’s simple. The best way to lose abdominal weight is to find an easy way to keep track of the food you eat and the energy it holds. By doing so, you can control the way you eat in order to get to your ideal body weight. I’ve found that there are foods that can help me lose weight by suppressing appetite, but ultimately you need a tool that will help you lose weight for free by tracking and calculating the total calories in the food you eat. The DailyPlate does just that.

Keeping Track of Calories and Nutrition

Once you get through the one-page registration, you can immediately get started tracking your food intake, looking up nutritional information, taking part in the DailyPlate forum community, or, heaven forbid, calculate the calories you’ve burned by working out (in an alternate universe).

The food diary is fast and easy, and by using it you never have to count a single calorie again. After each meal, you simply click on “My Plate,” search for the food you’ve eaten and add it to your diary.

One of the things that surprised me was the accuracy and size of the DailyPlate food database. For example, when I searched for “multigrain bagel,” I not only found thousands of results, but I found the exact bagel from Dunkin Donuts that I’d purchased that morning. To my dismay, it turned out that a Dunkin Donuts multigrain bagel is one of the most calorie saturated bagels in existence.  Luckily, the website application also offers suggestions for foods that can help me lose weight.  I can use all of the advice I can get.

Once you click on the item you ate, all of the data gets loaded into your “daily plate,” including calories, fat, carbs and all other nutritional content. The website automatically tracks all of the nutrition that you eat during the day.  As you add the food, the items show up on your My Plate page.

Cool Features For Lazy People

You probably got to this point because you’re too lazy to get on a treadmill, let alone constantly keep a log of the food you eat. That’s why The DailyPlate is perfect. To make the process even easier, the folks at The DailyPlate created a few extra, cool features to the site. The first of these is a “meal” system, where you can pre-load specific meals that you eat often.

Now, when you click on your “Standard Work Lunch,” it automatically loads the ham and cheese sandwich, pickle, and chips that you eat almost every day.  Underneath this widget in the right menu, you’ll also find the “What I Eat Often” box, where the foods you recently entered are listed.

After a while, you’ll find you can simply log into the system, click on the foods you eat often, and then log out – in a matter of seconds.  There are a few calorie management systems out there that are as easy as this. The right menu bar also saves the exercise and activities that you add to your daily calorie log, also for easy point and click use.

As you add items to your log of food and activities, the system gets easier and easier to use, because all of those items get loaded into these right menu widgets.  As you add the food you eat, and the exercises that you’ve done (if any), the page lists your calorie and nutritional totals at the bottom.

As the day goes on, each time you log in you can see how much of your daily calories and nutrition that you’ve already consumed. As you can see above – I love salt.

Monitor Your Progress With Graphs & Charts

Everyone loves a good chart, especially when you’re not the one who has to put it together. The cool thing about the DailyPlate is that as you’re entering your food consumption and activity details, the website constantly keeps track of your progress. Just check out the charts, calorie goals or weight goals at the top of your My Plate page.  As an example, I’ve clicked on my weight history for a graph of my weight from the beginning of 2008 into 2009.

Okay, it’s obvious I’ve been on the wrong track.  But a guy has to start somewhere right?  The system also tracks the calories you’ve consumed versus your calorie goal (based on your weight and activity level).  This progress is displayed on a dot chart.

Best of all, from the main page, you can monitor a pie chart that instantly updates as you add the food you’ve consumed. Just above that, you can even monitor how much water you’ve had throughout the day, to make sure that you hit the daily recommended limit (about 1.9 liters a day).

All of the information on your My Plate page, and the charts and data in the background, are constantly updated and tracked as you quickly click on the foods you eat throughout the day.  Counting calories has never been this easy.

Do you have a favorite website or application that you use to keep track of your health and fitness goals? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)
• Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone (6)
• Gyminee – “Stay Motivated. Have Fun. Get Fit.” (1)
• 6 Great Free Weight Loss Resource Sites (22)

Walking is probably the best exercise for me, but I get bored. So I tried listening to music. But I love country music and that’s generally fairly slow. So I tried to find country music that had the range of beats to keep me going. That’s how I found Best Workout Music

Best WorkOut Music is one man’s effort to bring you your own brand of workout music.  Thank you Amnon! His site has some great features such as a music database that you can search by beats per minute and music genre. Although Tibetan Throat Singing doesn’t return many results.

Didn’t find songs that turn your crank? That’s okay, Amnon wrote some neat software that will scan your own music library and give you the beat count for each song. It’s called….BeatScanner. Clever name, eh?

BeatScanner

As you can see above, BeatScanner lets you scan your music collection. Then you can have it automatically find the beats by clicking Find Song Tempo. Sometimes that doesn’t work though, and then you can click on Detect to manually determine the beat.

You can then move on to creating your playlist. To get the best playlist, enter the beats per minute (BPM) that you are looking for as well as the range, which is a plus or minus value.

Okay, my tastes are a little eclectic. Now, just check the songs that you want to have in your playlist. As you do this, BeatScanner will show you the total playlist time. Nice for tailoring the length of your workout. Once you choose a song the Save Playlist button appears. You know what clicking that will do.

Now that you have your list, you can sort the playlist to your tastes and then save it with a custom name, genre and description. I like the way that you can either save the songs directly to a disk or MP3 player from here, or just save the playlist within BeatScanner.

With my wide and varied tastes, and short-term memory issues, I sometimes can’t recall what I called the playlists. Under the Find Playlists tab, you can search through them by keywords.

But wait, there’s more! Go to the Recommend Playlists tab and update to the website. This feature allows Best WorkOut Music to create a better song library and some nice pre-compiled playlists. Doing this can earn you an activation code, valued at $24.95, for Repacer – Amnon’s software to tweak the beat of your music.

Really like Enya but can’t exercise to it? Repacer! How about your wedding dance song? Repacer!

Using Repacer is as simple as 1-2-3! Pick your song, pace your song, and save your song.

Pick It!!!

Pace It!!!

Save It!!!

(Ron Popeil would be so proud!)

I tested Repacer with Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. Bon Jovi rocks, on occasion. The song is 50 BPM, so I pumped it up to 100 BPM. It sounded like some crazy bluegrass song gone wrong, so I wouldn’t recommend changing the pace of any song by more than about 20%. Although, it should be noted that the pitch of the song did NOT change! I’m impressed.

With all of the tools at Best WorkOut Music, you can get your sweaty groove on to what ever music fits your fancy. Next thing you know, you’ll be shaking your svelte-self on the dance floor too! Go on over and let Amnon know who sent you.

Which apps do YOU workout to?

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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So have you been able to keep your New Year’s resolutions of the last year? If not, did you make wise resolutions for the New Year?

You likely already have all the knowledge and tools required to keeping resolutions. All it takes is an idea of how to use that and the motivation to start.

If you’re uncertain about where to start and have a bad record of breaking New Year’s resolutions from previous years, let us show you how it can be done. After all, you don’t want to end up doing it like this guy:

Making Good Resolutions and the Right Attitude

If you need some help in making wise resolutions and setting your mind right to sticking to them, I recommend reading the articles How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions and 10 Tips for Keeping New Year’s Resolutions on eHow and About.com, respectively. Briefly, they recommend to…

• be realistic and aim low
• keep the number of resolutions down, don’t overload yourself
• plan ahead and outline your plan
• tell everyone you know, so they can remind you
• when in danger of failing, make a pros and cons list for motivation
• keep talking about your resolutions
• track your progress
• reward yourself
• don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, some failure is OK
• make an effort to stick to your resolutions
• wait until spring for making resolutions
• keep trying and start anew anytime of the year

Reminders

As a regular reader of MakeUseOf you have all the necessary tools at your fingertips. But a ton of tools is roughly a ton too much. So let’s focus on a few good tools to keep you at your heels.

HassleMe (directory)

HassleMe will constantly send eMail reminders at random intervals, so you never know when the reminder will pull you out of your mental nap.

Resnooze (directory)

With Resnooze you can set up daily, weekly or monthly eMail reminders for recurring tasks. Of course it can serve as a reminder service for keeping your New Year’s resolutions. In each eMail you can edit the frequency or delete the reminder.

Remindr (directory)

Remindr can send simultaneous reminders on Twitter, Jabber, GTalk, your eMail and cell phone. Very simple to set up, however it has to be set up again and again.

Track Your Progress

Qwitter (directory)

Qwitter will help you quit smoking. On the website you can track how many cigarettes you are smoking each and every day, keep a journal to record your state of mind, view your progress and share the experience with others.

The great thing about Qwitter is that it’s fully integrated with Twitter. A Twitter account is actually required to sign into Qwitter. So you can easily hook up with your friends and have them motivate you.

Gyminee (article from Anthony)

If your resolution is to eat better and work out, Gyminee is for you. Gyminee provides workout programs, you can track your workouts, monitor your diet, keep a food diary, meet people who are doing the same and track your progress, for example on your iPhone and pass challenges until you reach your goals.

traineo

If you want to eat better and lose weight, you should have a look at this website. During the sign-up process you can select in which units (American, British, Metric) your progress will be measured, also your current weight and height, goal weight and time frame will be recorded. Finally, you can choose motivators by entering the names and eMail addresses of up to 3 friends or family members.

When that is done you can track your activities, the food you had during the day, your weight, keep a log and reframe your goals. Your progress is relentlessly recorded in pretty graphs.

Will you stick to your New Year’s resolutions this year? Let us know whether you already made it last year and how you made it!

Picture Credits: v_hujer, woodsy

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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But anyone can do something for their brain’s fitness. Here’s a small selection of things you can do online:

1. Search the internet

Apparently, searching the internet requires decision-making and complex reasoning, which is a challenge for the brain and keeps the respective key centers in a top notch condition. But instead of using Google all the time, try something new. There are hundreds of search engines out there and you’ll find some of these have been covered on MakeUseOf. Don’t be lazy, give them a chance!

If you can’t do without Google, at least try another interface, such as Sputtr for example:

2. Read blogs

But don’t stick to the same old, variation is what counts. So discover and read a new blog every week, for example by following links in Blogrolls or from interesting comments. You can also search randomly or by category using the Find Blogs search engine. There is quite a selection to enjoy. Interestingly, MakeUseOf is not listed…shame on them!

3. Read news

And not just those that are obvious. Try to find out about what’s going on in another country. Keeping the brain active is all about feeding it with information. Not just any information, but rather things you have a natural interest in, including things you may find difficult to understand at first. News is a door opener to many topics, for example politics, international relationships, history, landscape, the local food or language.

I am not going to recommend any mainstream site as I’m sure you all know CNN and the BBC and whatnot. For a bit of a different view in 43 languages, try World News. And remember, if you were not curious about anything at all, you would not be reading this in the first place!

4. Play Games

Games where you have to use your mind that is! Sudoku, crossword puzzles, riddles, all great ways to challenge the mind. But after some time you’ll need to increase the difficulty or switch to another stimulus to avoid monotony.

Braingle is an excellent source for different brain teasers! Besides that, the trivia, games and community, I found the Mentalrobics section very inspiring. Within the categories creativity, vocabulary, memory, and stress you’ll find lots of useful information on how your brain works and how you can take advantage of that, for example to master stress.

Also have a look at Simon’s article on web games for Brain fitness and Games for the Brain for a broader spectrum of games in different languages. Other than the same old, there is Guess the Flag, Crime Scene where you have to identify people, Memocoly where you memorize colors, and many more. The twist is that while you’re playing games, an IQ score evaluates your achievements.

5. Can you raed, Tihs?

Ins’t it urtlety cnosufnig waht the mnid can do? We otefn do not raielze jsut how mcuh our biran is cabalpe of. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig!

And the truth is, recruiting the potential your mind actually has is key to brain fitness. So never tire to try new things, especially if they may seem difficult. Maybe you can even see the 3D image in this:

For more 3D Stereogram Images and other illusions check out Eyetricks.

6. Socialize

Interactions with other people stimulate the brain. Even if these interactions happen online. So if you’ve been avoiding social networks (like myself), pull yourself together and give it a try. Everyone will find a community they can benefit from. Who knows whom you will meet, the world is only a fingertip away. And besides, connecting with other people brings happiness. The challenge is to figure it all out!

7. Listen to music

On MakeUseOf we have shown you tons of ways to discover music. While most music recommendation engines go by what you already like to suggest new things, to stimulate your brain cells you should actually try to listen to something completely different. Use your newly developed social skills and follow the musical likes of random strangers. Did you know music can trigger emotions?

8. Learn a language

When you search MakeUseOf for “learn language” you’ll find several websites that will teach you foreign languages for free or in a community based setting, where you can teach someone else at the same time.

One Minute Languages is a new one that has not been covered before. With all the things we have to pack into our lives today, One Minute Languages gives you an opportunity to sneak peek into a language. There are ten lessons to each language and each lesson is only a few minutes long. So it’s actually more than a minute, who would have thought!

Once you have completed the ten lessons you’ll be far away from actually speaking that language. However, you may be encouraged to study it in depth. And nothing is more challenging for the brain than to learn, speak and think in a foreign language. Think big, but start simple.

9. Make her turn the other way around…

Is she turning clockwise or counter clockwise? Try to make her turn the other way around. It really works, but don’t interpret too much into it!

10. Learn more!

If all of this made you curious about your own brain, check out Sharp Brains, a website that provides plenty of brain-related information. As “the brain fitness authority” they present the latest news and research on brain-related matter, including studies on exercises, improving memory, stress management and they feature interviews with the leading experts in the field.

Other websites to consider are The Brain from Top to Bottom and Your Amazing Brain, both of which offers detailed background information in Wiki-How style. The Brain from Top to Bottom is especially fascinating. You can select your level of understanding from beginner to advanced, learn about the brain from different points of view, even in French and I just love the overall concept of the site.

Taken together, the secret of brain fitness is to constantly challenge the brain. Doing crossword puzzles or playing Sudoku is great, but in the long run it’s monotonous. To keep your brain fit, you should learn something new every day. What did you learn today?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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One way Gyminee does this is through user-created workouts. Create your own workouts by specifying exercises, activities and selecting the total time you should perform each exercise, the target heart rate and details such as altitude (for running) and weight (for lifting); If you can’t really think of a great workout, browse through the millions of user-shared workouts for one that fits you and your lifestyle.

Set personal goals for yourself and track your progress with a convenient calorie intake logger. If you feel proud of your progress, share it with your Facebook buddies with an easy-to-use widget! Join other groups to meet people who share your interests and add them as “Gym Buddies”. I know I’m just listing here, but I hope you get the point that Gyminee has a broad range of user-specific tools that fit you. With the tools listed above, I’ve barely scratched the surface!

Workouts on the Gyminee website are created by professional athletes and just people who like what they do and want to share it with other users. In fact, the other day, an interesting workout caught my eye: “The 300 Workout”, featuring a picture of a bulky body-builder. Upon further examination, I read that the 300 workout was actually the exact workout performed by the actors of the movie “300″. A lot of these workouts can definitely provide expected results, as long as you persist in doing them. If you have a set of exercises you like to do, you can make your own workout, with a full list of stretches, activities and lifts to choose from. Add a description and title to make your workout more noticeable and helpful!

Once you’ve made your own workout, browse through hundreds of groups to find people who share the same interests as you. With groups with titles ranging from “Runner’s Only” to “Body Builders”, Gyminee has a group for everyone. Within group discussion areas, you can talk with other athletes and compare techniques and training equipment. If you really get to know someone, add them as your “Gym Buddy” and workout with him or her.

Another great tool featured is the Food Diary and Dietary Tracker. Log your day-to-day dietary information and track your dietary intake and look back to see exactly how many calories you consumed last Friday. Before you exercise, track the amount of carbohydrates, fats and proteins you consumed and if you like your pre-workout snack, save it as a “Favorite” and pull it up with a click of a button!

Regardless what types of exercise you enjoy, whether it’s hard-core cardiovascular workouts to if you’re just trying to stay fit, Gyminee is a great community for you to join and share your stories with. Plus, membership if free and the basic membership includes all the tools profiled above. In addition to all of this, if you’ve ever been sitting in a restaurant and can’t decide what foods are most healthy, check it up! With the new Gyminee application for the iPhone, you can log your dietary intake anywhere!

(By) Anthony is a student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SparkPeople – Free Online Health & Weight-loss Community (13)
• OneHundredPushups – A Geeky Pushup Workout Program to Get In Shape (19)
• Lose Weight For Free With The Daily Plate (9)
• How To Make Your Own Workout Music With The Right Beats (21)
• MedHelp- A Mental & Physical Fitness Log to Monitor your Health (15)