We've just released our latest round of updates and new features, which includes some handy new tools and features, with improvements to existing ones.

New Activity Feed - we improved and expanded our previous "activities of the community" and gave it alot more detail and information showing the flow of activities our member are doing.

2 new communication venues (Shouts and Success Stories) - With shouts, you can call out for some help and assistance from the community by our members. It could be used to receive some motivation, guidance, help, or just get something off your chest. With success stories, our members can share their stories of success with the community. You can find encouragement, and motivation, along with helping others out at the same time.

The commenting system has been improved - now you can reply to comments as well. Comments have also been added to photos as well.

The exercise tracker has had a major makeover to improve its functionality. Now you can create your own pre-set workouts - which should be very useful for those who have similar pre-set workouts each week. So instead of adding each exercise one by one, you can save them in a pre-set workout, and one-click add them whenever you perform this workout. This will save you time when entering exercises.

There are a number of other major/minor changes. Please report bugs on the forums or send me a message. Thanks!

FitNRG.com Online Calorie Counter and Fitness Tracker

 The first step when designing a weight loss plan is to know how much calories you burn and consume in a day. Losing weight can be an emotional (and sometimes physical) roller coaster for many, and achieving weight loss goals can be difficult, and sometimes, discouraging. How many times have you heard someone (or even yourself) say that they’ve managed to gain back what they lost, and then some? Why do individuals fail at weight loss? There is no simple answer.

Going on a diet of sorts, is not the answer to successful long term weight loss. Fundamental changes in lifestyle and behavioral patterns must be followed, taken in small steps, to create an environment that promotes weight loss and weight maintenance once the desired weight is reached.

How does one go about making these changes, and achieve weight loss success? Start by being accountable to yourself, to your goals – by tracking and measuring your weight loss goals, progress, and by knowing your daily, and weekly caloric expenditure versus caloric intake. In other words, by tracking whether you have a daily / weekly caloric surplus or deficit.

The basis of this concept is simple enough – figure out how many calories you consume daily and weekly, and compare that with how many calories you expend daily and weekly. Sounds simple enough, but without the right tools, doing something like this is downright difficult and frustrating, which is why the fitness and weight loss tracking tools and calorie counter at FitNRG.com come in so handy.

What’s in Your Diet?

 Be honest – do you know what’s in your diet? How much calories do you consume on a daily basis? Where are your calories coming from? Are you getting most of your calories from fat, proteins, carbohydrates, or a balanced portion of each? If you don’t have the answer to that question, then the first thing you need to do is figure out how many calories you are consuming, and where your calories are coming from.

A good place to start is using the free calorie counter and food journal on the site here at fitnrg.com. Simply search from the database of tens of thousands of food items, and add them to your food journal, the site automatically calculates your total protein intake, carbohydrate intake, fat intake, and provides a breakdown of the percentages of each macronutrient on a daily and weekly basis – providing you with valuable information and feedback on your diet.

How Much Calories do you Burn Daily, Weekly?

 Knowing how much calories you consume daily and weekly is only half of the equation. Equally important, is knowing how much calories you burned on a daily and weekly basis. This is easily tracked and calculated using the “Activities Tracker”.

The “Activities Tracker” provided calculates your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) and calculates your total daily calories burned based on the additional physical activities you perform and add to the tracker. The activities tracker provides a list of over 220 most common physical activities you can engage in. You will be able to see at a glance how much calories you burn each day, and your total calories burned each week versus calories consumed – it is important to know whether you have a caloric surplus or deficit, and make the necessary changes in your diet and physical activities.

FitNRG.com – More than Just a Calorie Counter and Food Journal

 To help make your weight loss and fitness efforts easier, FitNRG provides a complete set of tools and features including exercise tracker, diet tracker, personal blog, recipe book, meal planner, reports generator, and a large community of like-minded individuals who share common goals and interests that will help keep you motivated.

For successful long term weight loss, you need to be accountable to yourself – setup a plan for weight loss and carry through with that plan. Sometimes, you will find it helpful and motivating to be  accountable to someone else as well – about your diet, physical activities, and weight loss progress. It helps to find someone who shares a common goal, who understands the ups and downs you’re going through, and can help you stay motivated, and on top of things when things get discouraging. FitNRG.com has a large community of members who are interested in fitness and weight loss, don’t hesitate to join and take control of your weight loss goals.

On may 6, I took my family to China to for a vacation, and it was a vacation that we would never forget. 6 days after arriving in China, an 8.0 earthquake hit Wenchuan in Sichuan province. The city we were in was under 300 km away from the epicenter of the earthquake. (I know most news are still reporting the earthquake as a 7.8 or 7.9, but it was revised to 8.0 in China.)

Around 2:30 in the afternoon on the 12th, I was carrying my 9 months old daughter walking in the living room, and here's how the basic conversation went (between my mother and I) when the earthquake hit:

Mom: "Jim, did you feel that shake?"
Me: "What shake? Must be me walking..."
Mom: "No, you don't feel the shaking?"

By now, I had felt it, and when I looked at the LCD TV it was shaking violently, as was everything else, including the building - we live on the 8th floor. We made for the door as fast as we could. By the time we got to the door, it was shaking so violently that we had to brace ourselves against a wall, or railing, as we ran down 8 floors as fast as we could.

Moments after the earthquake, the streets and open areas were packed with people.

We ran to a safe spot in an open area across the street from our building. My wife was in the middle of her hair appointment when all this happened, and several minutes later, she found us in the massive crowd that had gathered in the park, hair still wet, and half finished. The violent inital shake lasted for about a minute or so, luckily, being almost 300km away, the force of the earthquake is greatly diminished. It was estimated that by the time it reached us, it was a 5.x (I can't remember the exact measure). I can't begin to imagine what the 8.0 would feel like.

In a matter of minutes, everything went from peace and calm, to panic and chaos - nothing else mattered at that moment other than survival. Granted, a 5.x earthquake is nothing compared to the 8.0 but the only thing on everyone's mind during those moments and the days following are "What if...". So for precautionary measures, millions of people slept out in the streets and in open areas for several days following the earthquake.

The night of the earthquake, no one dared to sleep under a roof.

A photo of the masses sleeping out in the open.

I got back to canada a few days ago (end of may), and by the time I left China, the news had been reporting that almost 70,000 people perished in the earth quake, and another 20,000 or more still unaccounted for, and over 350,000 injured. All I can say i that I'm sure glad to be back in Canada.

The new forums are up and running. It's fully integrated with he existing main site, so members do not need to register again to post on the forums - unlike the temporary forum which we had up in the past, which has been taken down now.

Please post any bugs, problems, issues you experienc using the new forms, and we'll get it straightened out!

We're aware of various bugs such as searching multiple terms in the calorie counter returning SQL errors, and are actively working on fixing these as quick as possible.

We're also working on fully integrating the forums with the main site, so that members will be able to post on the forums using their main account. The forum currently in place was simply a makeshift setup that will be replaced when we fully integrate the forums. We hope to have this done in the upcoming week.

Since we've just added the latest updates, there are various bugs we're trying to workout. The known ones get fixed, and I'm sure there are varioug bugs that we haven't found yet.

It would be very helpful if members can send me their feedback on bugs they discover! You can either leave bug reports here in a comment, or in our forums, or email me: jim @ fitnrg.com

Thanks!

It was requested that some sort of tutorial be made to help members navigate around the site and make use of the tools and features of the site, so I took the weekend and threw together a little tutorial on how to use most of the features and tools on the site here.

It's organized as the site account is for all users, so I hope it's straight forward enough to understand. =)

http://www.fitnrg.com/tutorial/tutorial-1-dashboard.html

Well, it's finally completed and uploaded to the live server from our test servers - after more than 2 months of delays. We had originally planned to get it done way back in early Jan. But new additions, more changes, extra improvements, etc... took up a lot more extra time!   Here's a list of some of the new changes:    

General Updates

- Overall re-design of the site  
- Updates made to the 5 main themes for users  
- Improved community building and networking functions  
- New toolset titled "Diet and Nutrition" after logging in  
- "Cardio Tracking" is now "Activities and Fitness" adding a new set of features to make users' activity tracking easier  
- Updated “Manage > Blog” page function by combining manage blog posts and blog categories into one page  
- “Manage > comments” page was improved to make it more user friendly
- “Manage > Friends” page was improved to make it more user friendly - “User Options” page
– allow user to choose to receive email notification for blog comments, private messages, and friend requests.
- New friend request function – when adding a user to your friends list, a “Friend Request” is sent to that user  
- Dashboard > Alerts – a new box that displays alerts to the user of various activities that require his/her attention  

My FitNRG > Exercise Tracking

• Added new function to this page that allows user to enter time spent working out to calculate estimated calorie burned based on intensity of exercises  
• This is then added to "Activities Tracker" to keep track of daily calories burned  

My FitNRG > Activities & Fitness  

- This was previously titled "Cardio Tracking"  
- A list of over 220 physical activities has been added to this tool that lets you calculate calories burned based on duration of the activity  
- This page now calculates (estimates) your daily total calories burned  
- This page also tracks your daily calories burned on a weekly basis  
- Tracks your daily calories consumed vs. calories burned, and calculates a NET calorie for you on a daily / weekly basis  

Diet & Nutrition > Calorie Counter  

- Search function now allows you to search the main food database, and also search custom foods added by all users of the community   
-  You now can view/edit/manage your previously entered custom foods and also quick add custom food to your calorie counter  
- There is a new “Recently Recorded” function that lets you quickly select from a list of your most recently added food items
- Tracks your daily calories consumed vs. calories burned, and calculates a NET calorie for you on a daily / weekly basis   
- A new water tracker that tracks your daily water consumption    

Diet & Nutrition > My Diet  

- New set of tools that lets you track your diet   
- You can select your diet from any of the major diets (ie. South beach, Bill Philips, Weight Watchers etc…)  
- You can also create your own customized diet plan  
- Track your progress throughout your diet   
- Share your opinion on various diets   
- Find other members on the same diet   
- View your diet history – see what diets you’ve done, what worked, and what didn’t    

Diet & Nutrition > Meals Planner   

- Tied in with the “My Diet” tool is the meal planner   
- This lets you plan any/all of your meals for any day/week of the year   
- You can plan your meals by adding your own recipes, or selecting from recipes added by other members of the community  
- After planning out your meals, you can one-click to quickly add a planned meal that has been consumed to your calorie counter – making calorie counting quick and simple  

Diet & Nutrition > Recipe Book   

- You can create and add your own recipes   
- Keep track of your list of favorite recipes  
- Add recipes to your meal planner   
- View, rate, and comment on recipes added by other users  

Well these are the major updates. I might’ve missed a thing or two, since there’s a large list of things that were added and improved.   We’re still working hard to resolve the bugs/problems that are still there from the update last night, and hope to have them resolved ASAP. So please be patient while we’re working away at it. Thanks!