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!

A popular blogger named Jeremy Zawodny just spent a few days blogging about his weight loss experiences. Jeremy lost 50lbs over the course of a year.

His approach is one we encourage, too, and we’ll spend a few minutes discussing it here. Mr. Zawodny started his diet before The Daily Plate was public, so he used a self-maintained spreadsheet to take his caloric intake. You’re luckier; you can use our MyPlate technology to track your calories with just a few clicks per day.

Enough background — let’s get to the weight-loss approach! Remember, not every weight loss plan is right for every person, and you should always check with a doctor first before starting a diet

One mistake that frequent and first-time dieters often make is attempting to do to much right away. It’s hard to change what you eat, the frequency with which you eat, the amount that you eat, and your physical activity level all at once. So, in this approach, you instead choose to take it easy. Let’s break it down into steps:

Step 1: Use MyPlate to track what you eat for a week. Some people call it a food journal; others call it a food diary. The important part is to make it accurate. If you just had a handful of popcorn, track it. If you only finished half your granola bar — track that too. You’re trying to get a good picture of what you eat during the day, over the course of a week.

You’ll simply go to The Daily Plate, search for the foods you eat, and once you find them, click the big green “I Ate This” button to add the food to your MyPlate history. You can adjust the number of servings and such pretty easily, too! And remember, your goal isn’t to to lose weight just yet — right now you’re just tracking everything more carefully. If you’re like many people, you may notice you eat a little less this week since you’re much more aware than usual about everything you’re eating.

Step 2: After your week of tracking, look back over your MyPlate history to see how many calories you consume per day, on average. Our site shows you some fancy charts and graphs to monitor your intake, but the biggest thing you need to know right now is about how many calories you consume per day.

Step 3: Use our calorie calculator to determine approximately how many calories you should eat each day to lose, say, 1 pound per week on average. If this number is more than 500 calories fewer than what you’re currently eating per day, you may want to start smaller. Eating just 200 or so fewer calories a day is a good way to get your feet wet, and it’ll have an impact on you and your health, just like eating 400 or 500 fewer calories a day would — it’s just a slower way to start. But pick a number of calories below what you currently eat, and set that as your goal.

Step 4: Find a way to meet your new calorie goal for the next seven days. This is the single hardest step, but it’s also the most important one. You don’t want to be hungry all the time — that makes a diet hard to stick with.

Some dieters find success with eating smaller, more frequent meals. Others stick to their old meal schedule, but try popular dieting tricks like eating more slowly, savoring each bite. (This gives you time to notice that you’re not hungry anymore more quickly than if you wolf each meal down in a hurry.) Chew sugarless gum in between meals to discourage snacking. Switch to diet soda. Mr. Zawodny found more frequent toothbrushing helped him, since that clean mouth feeling can discourage extra eating.

Don’t forget, The Daily Plate offers healthy alternatives to many of the foods you eat a lot — see how many calories you can save with a single patty instead of two, or without cheese, or with a low-fat dressing. You’ll satisfy your cravings while taking in fewer calories, which is ideal!

Step 5: Keep going. If you did it for seven days, CONGRATULATIONS! That’s a terrific start to a healthier you. If you had trouble, don’t despair: Look through your MyPlate history to find which big ticket items added the sharpest increases to your calorie intake each day, and work hard to avoid them. Is your calorie goal too high? Try a lower one, just for another week — learning to meet a calorie goal is an important early step.

Now, once you can meet your calorie goal for seven days, make it 30. Easier said than done, you say? Not necessarily! After just seven days of healthier eating, you’ll already start to feel a bit more energetic and in-control of your eating. Taking it from 7 days to 30 is less work than you might expect, and it will do wonders for your confidence. The key to any successful diet is enabling yourself to feel total control over your eating and your weight loss.

As you find the calorie goal easier to attain, you may consider lowering it a bit more — as long as you keep it at a safe and healthy level. And as you shed extra calories, you’ll of course shed extra pounds, too. (1 pound = about 3,500 calories; eating 500 calories fewer total per day means you’ll lose about a pound per week.) Again, as you do this, you’ll start to feel better, including having more energy during the day and finding it easier to sleep it night.

At some point, you may feel energized enough to start adding some new physical activity to your schedule. That’s great! Track any physical activity you engage in; it simply burns more calories and helps you to lose weight even faster.

But remember the key trick to this dieting approach: Correctly and consistently tracking everything you eat each day. That way, you’ll rightly feel in control and adequately prepared to lose weight.

A diet always sounds daunting before you start. The approach we’re describing here tries to remove some of the roadblocks many diets throw in your face — “Eat less, of different foods you don’t enjoy, while exercising more, and changing these other eating habits, all at once.” That approach is a great way to lose weight, but it’s a great way to get discouraged, too.

Instead, start with a week of simply tracking what you eat to get used to that pattern. Then slowly adjust to eating fewer calories each day, and over time introduce exercise or adjust your calorie level to continue steady weight loss or maintenance.

Good luck — and keep us posted!

It won’t come as too much of a surprise for you to learn that once again, we here at The Daily Plate have unveiled a variety of improvements, upgrades, and brand new features in the past week.

Last week, we launched the already hugely popular fitness tracking, where you can calculate and track the number of calories you burn through your daily activity. Since then, we’ve more than tripled the number of activities you can find and add to your free MyPlate calorie counter — everything from the elliptical machine to horseback riding to yoga to caring for a child. If you can’t find an activity that you do regularly, let us know, and we’ll do our best to add it!

Speaking of MyPlate diet tracking, we’ve had a few requests to tweak our Calorie Calculator. (You can already use the calculator to determine how many calories you should take in per day to maintain or lose weight.) Now, in addition to choosing healthy, attainable weight-loss goals of 1lb a week or 2lbs per week, we’ve added a third option: The “in-the-middle” 1.5lb a week mark. Check out the Calorie Calculator to see it in action!

And, as a thank-you to our users for continuing to use our site, provide feedback, and share it with your friends, we have another subtle change you may have noticed: We’ve removed all the ads from the MyPlate section of the site — which, of course, is where you do all your tracking, calculating, and maintain your profile. Browsing those pages ad-free should make them even more of a pleasure to use, and we’re glad to be able to make that possible.

Finally, one other quick thing to celebrate: We’ve cleaned up a few pages on the site — this blog for example, as well as our message boards, which are steadily picking up in interesting diet discussion. We have several more page makeovers in the hopper, and look forward to rolling them out in the weeks ahead.

As always, we welcome and encourage your feedback. Leave a comment here on the blog below, or post over on the message boards. We look forward to hearing from you!

Of course, The Daily Plate is focused on healthy eating. Our tools are all about letting you calculating your daily calorie requirement, and tracking what you eat.

But healthy eating is really only half of a healthy lifestyle. The other half is, not surprisingly, physical activity and exercise.

Let’s say you can consume about 2,000 calories/day to maintain your current weight. And let’s remember that scientists tell us that 3,500 calories is the approximate equivalent of one pound. So, if you consistently consume 300 fewer calories per day (1,700 total), you’ll lose more than a pound every two weeks (300 calories x 14 days = 4,200 calories, which is more than 1 pound).

With exercise, you make the weight loss process a lot easier. Let’s say you manage to walk briskly for just 30 minutes five times a week. If you’re of average weight, that brisk walk could lose you about 230 calories/day. And remember, that calorie loss is in addition to the 300 calories you’re avoiding in your diet — which means you’re now losing 1,150 calories per week through exercise, and 2,100 calories per week with your diet — for a total of 3,250 “lost” calories per week. That, my friends, is just shy of losing a pound per week — and it only “costs” you the extra 30 minutes walking each day, which you can skip on weekends.

Once you decide to start adding some physical activity to your daily routine, you’ll want to calculate and track how your exercise affects your calorie intake and your healthier lifestyle. And now, The Daily Plate can help you with that. Check out our new exercise and fitness calculator and start tracking your journey to a healthier you!