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!

Trans fats are constantly in the press these days! Different cities and states are banning the fats all the time.

But why? What’s up with trans fats?

Trans fats are a type of unsaturated fat. And the reason that trans fats get such a “bad repuation” is simple: Unlike other fats, trans fats have no known beneficial role in human health. Even worse, eating them increases the risk of coronary heart disease.

Researchers at Harvard have written:

By our most conservative estimate, replacement of partially hydrogenated fat in the U.S. diet with natural unhydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent approximately 30,000 premature coronary deaths per year, and epidemiologic evidence suggests this number is closer to 100,000 premature deaths annually.

Yikes!

So that’s why restaurants like KFC are publicly trumpeting their efforts to eliminate trans fats from their favorite recipes.

We here at TDP remain diet agnostic; our focus is on eating smarter, regardless of the diet you choose. But we feel pretty comfortable supporting the cause of eliminating heart-clogging trans fats from your daily food intake!

What are your thoughts — or questions — on trans fats?

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

The holidays don’t just bring good cheer and fun presents — they tend to bring lots of good foods, too! If you, shall we say, overindulged this holiday season, don’t worry: It’s never too late to focus in on healthier, smarter eating.

And that’s where The Daily Plate comes in. One of the most popular New Years resolutions year after year is to lose weight — but it’s also one of the most broken resolutions! Dieting isn’t easy if you go it alone. But The Daily Plate serves as a friend, advisor, and diet coach all-in-one… We provide you with the tools you need to track your food intake and plan meals, and with the motivation you need to stay focused.

We’re always working on tools to make tracking the foods you eat even easier. Head on over to the MyPlate section of our site to check out all the charts and graphs we offer. And if you need some extra support from our community after some holiday feasts, dive into our message boards, too!

Have a safe and healthy new year, and best of luck in your healthy eating!

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!

MSN has published a great article on healthy alternatives from popular fast food restaurants.

The whole three-page article is worth a read. Choice tidbits include:

Burger King recommendations:

[Smart choice:] Chicken Tenders (5 piece) - 210 calories, 12g fat (3.5g saturated), 920mg sodium

Eat this: Medium Onion Rings - 320 calories, 16g fat (4g sat.), 460mg sodium
Not that: Medium French Fries - 360 calories, 18g fat (5g sat.), 640mg sodium
Eat this: Chicken Whopper- 570 calories, 25g fat (4.5g sat.), 1410mg sodium
Not that: Whopper - 700 calories, 42g fat (13g sat.), 1020mg sodium

You’ll find all sorts of “lesser-of-two-evils”-style suggestions in the article — check it out!

We’ve launched a new feature here at The Daily Plate, and we think you’ll enjoy it. We’re calling it Food Diaries for short, and “Food, Diet, and Fitness Diaries” for long!

Basically, when you’re on your MyPlate page, there’s a new link there to write in your diary. You can type in some notes about how you’re feeling, about how the food you’ve eaten has affected you today, your weight loss goals / progress, etc.

Your diary can be just for you — or, if you’d like, you can make your diary public for everyone with just one checkbox. That way, you can share with friends and family your progress, what specific foods you’ve eaten, and more!

This is just the first step in our plan to allow you to share your MyPlate progress and your total experience here at TheDailyPlate.com with your friends and loved ones. We expect to roll out enhancements and new, cool features in the weeks and months ahead that will allow you to connect and share in even more ways.

For now, explore the diaries a bit, and of course — let us know what you think!

Oh, and for the geeks out there, if you make your food diary public, you can also subscribe to it as an RSS feed or add it to Google as a gadget — just use either http://www.thedailyplate.com/diary/rss/username/ or http://wwww.thedailyplate.com/diary/gadget/username to get started!

When our small staff here first started building The Daily Plate, it was really a site for ourselves; we wanted to find a way to take control of our weight and eat smarter. Now that the site is picking up steam (and users) all over the Internet, we’re getting lots and lots of user feedback — and we couldn’t be happier.

Over the past few weeks as The Daily Plate has grown in popularity, we’ve received hundreds of emails and message board posts with feature suggestions — and almost all of them are brilliant. Here are a few highlights of brand new features we implemented in the past week, based on user feedback:

1. Advanced search: Specify exactly which restaurant or brand you want to find foods from. Or, limit your search results to generic items only. And, you can even choose to only look for foods with fewer calories than a total you specify. We have plans to make advanced search even better — so stay tuned!

2. Fiber tracking: Starting this week, you can find your daily, weekly, and monthly fiber intake totals on the MyPlate calorie counter. We even offer charts to show your fiber consumption breakdown by day and over time.

3. Meals: One of our most common feature requests! Do you find yourself adding the same breakfast to your MyPlate page often? Create a meal group of any number of items you often consume together, and then you can add all of the foods to your MyPlate page with just one click! Check it out!

4. One-click food tracking: You’ve probably noticed that every single food item has a big green “I Ate This!” button on it, which you use to add the item to your MyPlate page. You may have also noticed that each time you click that button, it dynamically changes to ask you if you want to indicate that you ate the food in question today, yesterday, or some other date. But that means that when you’re tracking every day, you’d need two clicks to add an item to your MyPlate page for the day.

So, we’ve added in a pair of quick links right underneath the “I Ate This!” button, so that you can indicate you ate the food today or yesterday with just one click. We know your time is valuable and that every click counts, so we hope the power users among you will appreciate this small shortcut.

What’s next?
Our list of future features to roll out is a long one, but we’re happy to make it longer Add a comment here with your feature requests. We’re trying to respond quickly to popularly requested features, so if there’s something The Daily Plate is lacking, tell us, so that we can make it even better at helping you eat smarter!