My Fitness Pal is a 100% free calorie counter and weight loss tracking service to help you track and achieve your weight loss targets. I just signed up and the process is fast, easy and cost-free. You get a quick reminder of your target weight loss by a specific date based on data you provided during the sign-up - mine was 10 pounds by July 1, 2007.

The main page features a quick snapshot of your daily calorie goals, which can be updated by recording your food intake via your personal food diary an your burned calories via you exercise log. This calorie counter feature is a great way to both track your daily progress as well as keep a written record to see how you implemented your weight loss activities several weeks or months down the line.

The calorie counting service is powered by their exercise and food databases. The very extensive exercise database allows you to choose the exercises you performed and how long you performed them. The system will then, based on your weight, give you an approximate amount of the number of calories the activity used up. This is a great service to those actively counting calories.

What I love about the database is it’s not focused exclusively on regular strength and cardiovascular exercises but takes it a step further by allowing you to compute burned calories based on normal everyday activities such as cleaning the room, playing the drums or playing frisbee. This allows a much more exact computation of burned energy than just logging in gym workouts and aerobic sessions. You can also create your personal exercises and input your approximate calorie burns for each, which means you can add regular activities for you like walking from home to the bus stop at a set pace or making love during the evenings. It’s a great personal touch.

They have a similar database for food where, like in exercises, you can also customize for your own intakes.

Lastly, I am a big fan of community forums when it comes to weight loss. I don’t think there’s anything more helpful than a community of like-minded individuals ready to help you achieve your goals and working towards the same.

Drinking excessively gives terrible hangovers.  So if you’ve any sense, avoid it whenever possible.

I avoid drinking more than one or two beers at a time for this reason.  I hate hangovers.  I hate having to sleep longer than normal.  It’s a waste of time and usually marks the loss of an actually productive day.

However, with the holiday season coming along, I know I’ll be in for several boozing parties that I will actually either want or have to go to.  For others gearing up their livers and their bodies for the holiday drinking, here’s stuff I’ve done over the years to avoid those nasty headaches.

1. Drink a 500 ml Gatorade before drinking.  Then before retiring to bed, drink another 500 ml.  Don’t be conservative about drinking lots of water during the parties too.  I’ve never had a hangover every single time I did this, no matter how much alcohol got consumed.  This is my plan A for the holidays!

2. The morning after a heavy drinking session, you will normally be suffering from a vitamin C and a vitamin B deficiency.  In order to normalize this and restore energy quickly (and potentially prevent further hangovers), take 2 tablespoons of dry yeast, 4 tablespoons of honey and a freshly squeezed glass of citrus, papaya or pineapple juice.  This should start the day right just when it’s about to be wrong.

3. If headache has already struck, do the following things.  Each one should help relieve the headaches a little bit, hopefully fixing it in the course of a couple of hours:
* Take a quick cold shower
* Do #2 to restore vitamin levels in the body
* Medicate with either aspirin or ibuprofen to soothe the headache
* Eat some carbohydrates
* Take any of the following, preferably in juice form: cabbage, celery, artichoke, beetroot, apple and tomato.  Make your own combinations to taste.
* Sleep for 1 or 2 hours

1. Drink lots of water. I bet you’ve heard this a thousand times. So why aren’t you doing it? Drink lots of water when eating. It fills you my friend.

2. Shift to a fruit and vegetable centered diet. Plant-based diets just help you consume less fattening and less chemical-based stuff. You can eat too much cabbage and never worry about serious repercussions, I swear!

3. It’s okay to leave food on your plate. I Know mom made you clean up that plate of dinner she cooked and labored so hard for. But guess what? Mom doesn’t cook your dinner anymore. You’re probably near her age when she was telling you to eat all your food. Social conditioning sucks but you don’t have to do it anymore. You’re old enough to be fucking over that shit. Dude.

4. Start looking at food as sustenance, something that gives you energy and allows you to work through the day. Quit viewing it as a recreational activity or a way to bond with friends. Food is supposed to sustain you to do meaningful work, not be meaningful in itself.

5. If you want to enjoy the way a particular food tastes, then eat slower than normal. You can enjoy it as much if you eat slowly the same way you think you can enjoy when you it plenty of it.

6. Chew slowly and pace yourself. Chewing slowly digests your food better and pacing yourself gives you more time to evaluate whether you’re really still hungry or you’re stuffing food in your face for another reason.

7. Stand up. This will take a bit of judgment on your part but stand up when you think you’ve eaten a fair amount of food yet you still want more. It’s nearly impossible to determine how full you are while you’re sitting. The mind seems to equate being comfortable with still being hungry when you’re downing that steak that the only viable way to inform yourself if you’re filled is to get up and reset the environment.

8. Stop justifying your behavior. The reality is, there’s no excuse for eating like a pig. The simple reason being that you’re not a pig. The complex one being that your body doesn’t need so much food. It needs enough to be productive throughout the day but how many of you reading this on the internet actually climb buildings or lift heavy equipment for a living? You only need as much energy as you will expend so consume only what you need. It’s not only healthy for you but it’s less taxing on the environment you live in.