Wow, I think your review was longer than mine Thank you so much. The comparison with other sites is great. I’ve never really been motivated to try any of the others, so I had no real basis for comparison.

Thanks for sharing this site!

I’ve run the gamut of sites that allow you to track your intake and your exercise. It seems like they are either feature-rich (with horrific interfaces) or more slick (with terrible features). Gyminee seems promising. I’m trying to decide whether to supplant my other site(s) with it. Here are my thoughts:

1) Nice, Web 2.0 interface. Dawn, I hear your pain with entering food items. Gyminee actually has this about 90% right. It is the best interface I’ve seen so far. What’s missing, however, is the ability to enter the individual elements of a recipe and then save the recipe itself. Some sites call this “food grouping”, others call it simply “recipes.” I really love that Gyminee is harnessing its user base to grow the food database (so many sites miss this obvious thing!). It seems that there are more foods in the Gyminee database than any other site I’ve seen so far.

2) The prompts to upgrade to a Pro account are indeed a bit much. I’m not seeing all that much value added in the Pro account–I want to see a bit more than the screen shots I’m seeing. Maybe a month for free so I can see if it’s really worth it?

3) One of the other sites I’ve been using is Sparkpeople.com. If you go there, try not to throw up when you see the interface. BUT Spark is very full of features. I don’t need all of them, but one of the things they do that I find very compelling is give you “points” for achieving certain things (e.g. drinking 8 glasses of water, entering in all your food for the day, exercise minutes, performing certain activities). Assuming this is not patented or something, I’d love to see Gyminee look at putting in some motivational factor like this.

4) Tracking your exercises on Gyminee is mostly done right but I find that the calories it estimates (if it estimates calories, which sometimes it doesn’t, which is confusing) seem a bit off. Not sure what’s going on there.

5) One of the things I’ve come to realize as I’ve used these sorts of sites over the years is that I–and possibly other users?–want it both ways. I want a site that can give me a lot of in-depth stuff to do when I “feel” like it: articles and forums and challenges and complexity and points. Spark gets this right. But I also want a site that I *don’t* have to spend a lot of time on to get my day-to-day stuff done. MyFoodDiary does this right. Some days I want to spend a while and really get into it. Other days I have, you know, work to do. I think Gyminee is doing well at the “quick” part, maybe less so on the “in-depth” part.

6) I would never have figured out how to adjust my nutrition goals if it weren’t for Stephen’s comment above. I kept looking on the “adjust my nutrition goals” page, which is really where it seems like it should be.