A calorie counter is an easy way to keep track of your daily food intake. It can help you find the number of calories in the foods you eat, as well as the total calories you've consumed and burned throughout the day.

Some tools like the Calorie Counter allow you to look up the nutritional content of certain foods. For example, if you click on "bananas," it will tell you that one medium-sized banana contains 105 calories, 14.4 grams of sugar and 27 grams of carbs.

Other more detailed online calorie trackers such as MyDietJournal, My Calorie Counter and FitWatch allow you to establish a daily food diary. After creating an account, you input everything you eat or drink throughout the day from a pre-set list and the serving size. The calorie tracker summarizes total calories, as well as total carbs, sugar, protein, salt and fat consumed each day. Some will even allow you to enter your weight-loss goal and tells you how many calories you should be consuming and how close to that limit you are after each meal.

There are also calorie trackers as part of complete weight-loss programs such as Calorie King or Weight Watchers.

More Diet Questions Answered:
How Many Calories Do I Need?
How Much Protein Do I Need?
How Many Carbs Per Day Do I Need?

Forget about confessing a midnight snack splurge to your closest girlfriend, or even to your support group. Now you can tweet your diet successes and failures to the whole world. Twitter's Tweet What You Eat (TWYE) is the latest dieting tool that combines information-age technology with accountability.

While the idea of a food journal is not new, sharing it with thousands of strangers is. Users basically log on to Twitter and tweet every morsel they consume throughout the day. "Recently tweaten" foods are then totaled for calories and reported, along with your weight, to everyone. With more than 8,000 followers to date, creator, Alex Ressi claims it is the easiest food diary you'll ever keep.

There is also an online forum that allows users to post questions, support and feedback. Some tweet about having no idea how much they were really eating until it was on the screen in front of them. One twitter rejoiced about losing eight pounds in the last two weeks; another confessed to eating McDonald's every day for two months.

If losing a few (or a few dozen) pounds is your aim, one of the first things you'll need to do is identify where the bulk of your daily calories are coming from. The best way to do this -- as most trainers, nutritionists and weight-loss professionals will tell you -- is by keeping a food journal and tracking everything you eat. Doing so is relatively easy -- there are plenty of online tools to help you out, or you can do it the old-fashioned way and keep a notebook on hand. It might seem like a bit of a pain, but people who keep a food journal usually say it's really helpful.

So the question is: Do you keep a food journal?

Last week, I wanted to know if you had kicked the soda habit or if you still indulged.

• 44 percent drink it from time to time as a treat.
• 29 percent wouldn't touch it.
• 22 percent drink it regularly, simply because they love it.
• 5 percent love it so much they hardly drink anything else.

Good news, soda lovers. Coca-Cola's rolling out a new product with dieters in mind.

Keep track of the latest in diet and fitness Twitter trends and opinions with this weekly post. Not only will AOL Health's Twitter alias Healthpop and That's_Fit ask fitness-related questions and share the best responses with you, we'll scour the Twittersphere for the latest buzz on everything from good eats to exercise routines gone bad.

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We can't help but notice everyone's a-Twitter over Tweeting What They're Eating (@TWYE) these days, so we checked into see what people had to say about keeping a food journal on and offline:

Quick -- grab a pen and paper if you want to lose weight and keep it off. It worked for dieters in one of the largest and longest weight-loss maintenance trials ever conducted. The more food journals dieters kept, the more weight they lost.

Dieters followed the DASH diet -- it's low in saturated fat, cholesterol, and total fat; emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy foods; includes whole-grain products, fish, poultry, and nuts; encourages fewer servings of red meat, sweets, and sugar-containing beverages; and is rich in magnesium, potassium, calcium, protein, and fiber. These folks also attended weekly group sessions and exercised for at least 30 minutes per day. And some jotted down everything they ate -- these are the lucky ones who after six months lost twice as much weight as those who did not journal what and how much they'd eaten.

Simple stuff. Eat. Write it down. Eat. Write it down. It's one way for your to take a critical look at your eating habits. Here's exactly how you do it.

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Keeping a food diary is a proven way to help people take off the weight, teaching portion control and accountability. Though you can buy a food journal online, you don't need to, and a pre-made food diary won't be customized to your unique needs. Instead, why not try making one yourself?

About.com has some simple instructions for making your own food journal, including pages that you can print out and put into a three-ring binder. BBC also has printable pages that you can use to make your own food diary. And Celiac Travel has some examples of a homemade food diary done on Excel (though hers is for food allergies, not weight loss).

One thing to keep in mind when you start tracking your intake is that less is more. It's a big commitment, writing down everything you eat, so pick just one or two things to start. For instance, maybe you want to count calories or track your fruit and vegetable servings. As you get more experience, your tracking will become more sophisticated, and soon you'll be tracking "pounds lost" as well!

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Keeping a food journal is one of the simplest weight-lost tools out there. But it's not as simple as just writing down what you ate -- According to this article from Super Athlete Gabby Reece, you have to keep track of what time you ate, how much you ate and how you felt when you ate. And don't forget -- you need to keep track of your drinks too!

After time, you might start to recognize patterns in your eating. For instance, did you eat more at times when you were stressed about your job? Did you eat more when you had a drink before dinner? Once you've recognized these destructive habits, you can break them.

For more tips on keeping a food journal, click here.

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I've tried many methods of food journaling: FitDay, an Excel spreadsheet, making my own charts, etc. I've finally found that what works best for me is a notebook I keep on my kitchen counter. It's not professional, but it works for jotting down meals as I eat them and keeping track of my calories (when I'm counting them). The problem with this method is that I can't take it with me when I go out, and on busy days that means I'm not tracking what I'm eating.

The Little Black Books seems to be the answer to that problem. It's a nicely organized little food journal in an attractive case the looks easy to slip into a pocket, purse, or briefcase. For a small little package, there's a lot here; you can record Weight Watchers points, calories, dairy, protein, grains, water intake, etc. In fact, there's so much here, it may actually be too much for me, since I only monitor calories. But if you're looking for a portable way to track what and how much you're eating each day, Little Black Book may be the thing for you. The book sells for about $20, and you can visit Starling Fitness for a full review.

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It doesn't matter how many good wishes you have, or good intentions, towards exercising more and eating better to lose weight -- if you leave it up to chance to happen it never will. And you may not even realize you're leaving it up to chance, but every time you fail to plan that's exactly what you're doing. Come on now, really, what are the odds you're going to get up early to workout and have a healthy lunch to bring with you to work if you don't think about it until your alarm is going off Monday morning? Slim to none I'm willing to bet.

Honestly you can't expect yourself to just magically start developing new habits -- you have to plan them! You have to do them on purpose, at least in the beginning until they become a natural part of your life.

To simplify things down to just the nitty gritty, making weight loss and fitness happen breaks down into two areas: planning out your new eating habits and planning out your new exercise/activity habits.

Step One: Plan out your daily meals and snacks.

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Wouldn't it be nice if we could think ourselves thin? In the real world, thinking isn't the same as doing, but having your head in the weight loss game is just as important as eating right and exercising. So how do those who successfully lose weight get themselves mentally prepared? Here's a list from WebMD that outlines eight ways to "think thin" and set yourself on the right path to weigh loss:

1. Create a mental picture of yourself at your goal weight and refer to it when the going gets tough.
2. Be realistic.
3. Set frequent small goals to make changes gradually.
4. Get support from family, friends, or wherever you can.
5. Create a detailed plan and stick to it. That means planning your meals the night before.
6. Celebrate successes with rewards.
7. Trade in old, bad habits for healthier ones.
8. Keep track. Chart your weight, measurements, what you eat each day, exercise, mood...etc. Seeing written progress will prove to you you've done well, even when it doesn't feel that way.

You can't think yourself thin, but you can have a healthy mindset that will help you reach that goal weight before you know it.

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