We were mentioned on today’s morning news on WNBC4 — check it out!

Now that it’s 2008, it’s time to renew your commitment to healthy eating. And as we’ve said before, the smartest single change you can make to your eating habits is to track the foods you eat.

In addition to tracking, it’s always helpful to have friends for support. On TDP, you can meet new people in a variety of ways. Be sure to check out:

our message boards

groups — they’ll help you stay accountable towards your calorie goals!

diets — special groups devoted to different diets

Good luck!

Hello again from The Daily Plate! We hope you’re finding that TDP is helping you to track the foods you eat each day, making healthier eating an easier task. Combined, our members have lost thousands of pounds tracking what they eat at The Daily Plate.

But if your weight loss has recently plateaued or you’re finding it tough to stay motivated, don’t lose faith! TDP offers several ways — including one brand new one — to boost your morale through other members who know exactly what you’re going through.

You may already know that you can meet and add friends on the site. Now, you can keep informed about what decisions your friends are making — the foods they eat, the exercises they do — as well as any public messages they post at The Daily Plate (in groups or the message boards)… All with the href="/users/feed/">Friends’ Feed.

When your friends track foods or exercises, join groups, post messages, write comments, or add new friends, small updates appear in your Friends’ Feed. (A smaller version of the Feed appears on your profile.)

Similarly, your own updates appear in your friends’ feeds, so they can mutually keep current and motivated with you!

Remember, only members whom you’ve added as friends will see your feed updates. And you can always update your feed settings in the site preferences.

The Daily Plate has been written up on Mashable, one of the definitive Web 2.0 blogs. They mention the fact that we’ve crossed 100,000 members, have maintained profitability, and that we’re out of beta.

Thanks, Mashable! Read their write-up.

New, faster server
Lose the wait while you lose the weight!

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve upgraded to a new, faster-than-ever web server. What this means for you is no more slow-loading at lunch time when you’re logging into The Daily Plate to track your meal. Everything on the site feels much snappier now, thanks to this major upgrade! Please check it out, and let us know if you run into anything unusual…

Exercise and fitness tracker, completely revamped
Now, search for physical activities the same way you search for food!

Our new fitness directory lets you browse through all the different exercises and activities in our database. And now, you can use the search box on our site not just to search for the foods you eat each day, but also for the exercises you do. From basketball to badminton, or aerobics to yoga, The Daily Plate now makes it easier than ever to track what you’re doing each day.

What’s next?
As we approach 100,000 members, we have big plans for the next upgrades to our site!

We’ve recently been working on our recipe system, making it more accurate and easier to use. (Oh, and don’t forget our thriving message board devoted to healthy recipes!) There are other new features in the works, and we can’t wait to release them. Thanks for your support, and please don’t forget to recommend The Daily Plate to all your friends!

It’s an exciting time on the site these days. Member Groups have exploded; our most active groups have hundreds of members and dozens of new posts each week.

Thanks in no small part to the new free trial, our Gold membership program has really taken off. Thanks as always to our Gold members for their extra support.

And remember, the number one way you can help support TDP is simple: Tell your friends about us!

Hope everyone’s having a fun and healthy summer — and remembering to track each barbecue or sticky ice cream cone at The Daily Plate!

Greetings again from The Daily Plate!

First up, we’ve made a variety of improvements to the site: It’s easier than ever to track foods that you ate several days ago (or are planning to track in the future). We’ve upgraded Groups so that they now load much faster, making it even more fun to compare how you’re doing with your TDP friends and interact with them. And we’ve added a module that shows you local addresses and phone numbers for the restaurant or supermarket you’re browsing foods from, based on your address.

We’re ready to work on more new features for the site, and we always find that our members know better than anyone just what we should work on next. We’re thinking about making improvements to the tagging system, adding even more features to Groups, enhancing TDP Mobile, or revamping the recipe system. But we’re open to your thoughts — please take a moment to vote for the next feature we develop!

Finally, we wanted to mention that now you can try upgrading to Gold — for free! We’re offering a free-trial so you can explore a bit more before you commit. Thanks as always to our Gold members for their ongoing support of the site! Click here to learn more about Gold.

Thanks for reading, and please do send us your feature requests. And best of luck with your smarter eating!

-The Daily Plate team

We have made some great changes at The Daily Plate, and we hope you’ll be as excited about them as we are.

First, we’ve added a new, blazing-fast server — our third! We think you’ll find the site is much zippier than before, and there are no more “lunch time slowdowns.” We are really thankful to those members who have upgraded to Gold for their support, which directly enabled us to get this new server online.

We’re also pleased to announce we’ve brought on our first customer-service staffer. Sherri will be answering your support emails, and helping out on the message boards as well.

And we have some brand new features, too! By popular request, we’ve added TDP Mobile, a lightweight version of the site that works great with your smartphone or PDA. Find out how many calories are in that burger — before you order!

Another new feature is our friends list. Now you can add your favorite people on The Daily Plate to your friends list to get in contact with them more easily. You’ll even know whether they’re “online now” or not! We have lots of extra features in line to go along with the friends list as well, so stay tuned!

Various other upgrades have gone live on the site — searching is faster than ever, our popular Groups feature has some added enhancements, and we now respect your own local timezone better than before.

So head on back to The Daily Plate and check out all the new goodies! As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

Greetings from the staff here at The Daily Plate! We hope you’re doing well in your ongoing quest to eat smarter. Here are a few quick updates on some new features we’ve launched recently:

1. Improvements to Meals!
A few weeks ago, we asked you what feature you’d most like us to work on next. The response was overwhelming; you wanted improvements to the Meals feature on the site! And we’ve done just that: Now when you track a meal on your MyPlate page, the entire meal is condensed into one line. (You can still expand that meal to see all the items that are in it, of course!) This is just the first of several improvements to Meals we plan on making in the coming weeks, but this was by far the most popular feature request for the site.

2. Groups!
We are thrilled to unveil this feature! Groups are a great you can share your progress with others who share your motivations and diet strategies. Anyone can create a group at The Daily Plate, and you can make it public for anyone to join, or private and limited to a selected group of friends/family members whom you invite. Here are some of the great things you can do with groups:

• Track everyone’s nutritional totals on a day-by-day basis, to help motivate each other!
• Group creators (and others they “promote”) can create blog posts visible to all group members.
• Anyone in the group can comment on those blog posts, to get a real dialog going!

We imagine there will be groups for different dieting strategies (Atkin’s, South Beach, etc), families who are all working together playing their own version of “The Biggest Loser,” protein lovers, fitness gurus, and more — but that’s really up to YOU! In fact, we can’t wait to see what you came up with.

So, take a look at Groups and let us know what you think. And again, this is just Phase 1; we have plenty more up our sleeves for this feature!

3. Messaging!
We know many of you are finding an added benefit on our site: You’re making friends with people who share your weight-loss goals! Now, in addition to talking to people on the message boards and sharing with them in our new Groups, we’ve made it even easier to exchange messages with them, right on the site! With on-site messaging, you can write privately and directly to other members you meet — it’s a great way to keep in touch!

As always, we love hearing from you. Please feel free to share your feedback on The Daily Special, our official blog, or on our message boards. Stay tuned for more great features in the coming weeks!

Yours in smarter eating,
The Daily Plate team

Help spread the word about The Daily Plate! By popular request, we’ve put together four slick TDP badges you can place on your website, blog, or MySpace page to show your love for TheDailyPlate.com.

Check it out: http://www.thedailyplate.com/share/

We’re thinking about hosting a contest in the future to reward our members for their continued help in sharing our site with their friends…

We’ve been busy working on all sorts of features to help our members eat smarter. We’ve heard from many of you about the weight you’ve lost tracking your diet with The Daily Plate, and we’re thrilled to continue making it easier and easier for you all. Here are just a few of the recent improvements to the site:

1. Gold Membership. We announced this a couple weeks ago, but our Gold membership program is now in full-swing. We’ve already made various improvements to the Weight Loss Goals system that lets you track the pounds as you lose them, and we’ve added several new fun, customizable progress bars that you can display to share your progress with friends.

Additionally, we’ve now unveiled Family Memberships. If you and a few family members are all tracking with The Daily Plate, you can save nearly $30.00 when you upgrade to Gold as a group.

2. What I Eat Regularly. This page automagically lists foods that you eat the most often, and lets you easily add them to your MyPlate tracking. You can also create a saved “meal” of foods you eat together often from this screen. And now, by popular demand, you can remove foods from this list if you no longer need them there.

3. New items, available immediately. Since we launched, we’ve allowed users to enter in the nutrition information for new foods that were missing from our database. Now, we’ve upgraded that system so that items you enter into our database are available to track immediately. You no longer have to wait for our staff to review the item before you can add it to MyPlate; it’s available instantly!

We have plenty more exciting features up our sleeves that we plan to roll out in the weeks to come. Stay tuned, and best of luck with your healthy eating!