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!

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!

Above all, we here at The Daily Plate try to listen to our members.

Here’s a small sample of what you’ve been saying: