MyFitnessPal.com

. . . and now, a word from our sponsor: your body.

Hey lady! The one about to stuff yet another peppermint Oreo in her mouth—I’m talking to you! Put the cookie down and step away from the desserts. For god sake’s woman! Sweet rolls, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter chocolates, chocolate dipped pretzel rods, doughnuts, cheesecake, custard pie, and don’t even get me started on the alcohol—what is this?! A health strike? Would it kill you to take an active interest in feeding me right and moving every now and again?! (And, by the way, Smartass, moving from the couch to the kitchen and back to the couch again doesn’t count! And no, walking up the stairs to go to bed doesn’t count either.) The holidays are over! Eat a salad already or at least a piece of whole grain toast! Hell, even multi-grain chips would be a start!

At the risk of initiating a last-minute eating binge, I have a suggestion: myfitnesspal.com. Don’t freak out, just check it out. All you need to do to get started is enter a few basics—your weight, height, age and goals (e.g., losing or maintaining weight, exercising)—and myfitnesspal.com will tell you how many calories a day you can eat. Now, if as one of your goals, you plan to move every now and again, you’ll earn extra calories. Even if you loaf along the ground like a giant slug for an hour, you could earn an extra 150 calories for the day. Drag yourself up to both feet and walk like a human sloth and you might just earn an extra 200. Walk briskly for the same length of time, and you could earn an extra 300 calories—that’s enough to allow yourself a treat. Mind you, you’ll have to choose which treat you want. Your days of having all of them are over, Missy!

Once you’ve set up your daily caloric allotment and have established your goals, the only thing you have left to do is to enter what you eat and for how long you’ve moved. When you check in to myfitnesspal.com, the Home tab shows you how many calories you have left for the day. The Food tab allows you to search for foods and enter the ones you’ve eaten. Once you’ve entered your foods, it also shows you the nutritional content of your foods in up to five categories. For example, in addition to calories, you might ask myfitnesspal.com to display saturated fat, salt, sugar, iron, calcium and so on. Also, since you’re busy, you can download the mobile application for your Droid or Kindle Fire or whatever so that you can update myfitnesspal.com on the fly; that way, you won’t forget all the little things you shove into my mouth during the day.

So if you choose to shove 10 chips into my mouth, myfitnesspal.com will let you know those cost you 150 calories. Were they worth it?