It was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin who said: “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” If Ben were alive today he might add “New Year’s resolution Diet” to his list of life’s inevitable events.

Franklin was an avid diarist and believed that keeping a daily journal was an excellent way to manage the important things in your life.

As most people know, Franklin was also a great inventor and would have marveled at today’s technologies for diary and journal-keeping. (Imagine charging an iPhone by attaching it to a kite in a lightening storm.)

Inspired by Ben’s example, we decided to review some of the top mobile apps for diet journaling and weight management.

PhotoCalorie™ is one of the newest and most interesting platforms. Developed by a team of physicians, nutritionists and computer scientists at Harvard Medical School, Boston University and MIT, PhotoCalorie is both a visual food journal and nutrition search engine that simplifies the tedious task of calorie counting.

In line with the popularity of food photography, PhotoCalorie offers the ability to take and store pictures of your meals in an electronic journal which you can scroll through as you would your facebook pictures. Part of the idea is that seeing what you eat over time may be more effective in changing your eating habits than the old-fashioned way of keeping text lists of foods and calories. In this sense, PhotoCalorie provides a “right brain” visual approach to managing your eating patterns in addition to the “left brain” calorie-counting approach of other diet diaries.

Another unique feature of PhotoCalorie is its search engine technology, allowing users to search for an entire meal in one step, simply by separating each food by commas and multiplying each food by its respective serving size. This feature dramatically shortens the food entry process. Finally, PhotoCalorie offers users the ability to share their food journal with their doctor, dietitian, personal trainer or whoever else they’d like in a read-only format. PhotoCalorie has an interesting blog and you can download the app from the iTunes store.

Lose it! is one of the most venerable iPhone weight loss journals and offers a number of features to track your diet, exercise and weight changes over time. Lose it! also provides a way for users to join discussion forums of people with similar goals. The app’s motivators section lets you set reminders to enter your foods right before your meal, and receive daily or weekly emails summarizing your progress. You can download the Lose it! app from their website.

Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG® Foundation provides a calorie-tracker and workout log. Although LIVESTRONG is basically similar to Lose it!, the platform has many other aspects geared toward overall health and well being. These include access to health tools for managing diabetes, quitting smoking or learning new exercises, for example. There’s also a large amount of educational material about nutrition, fitness and health at their website.

Here is a page of Benjamin Franklin’s daily planner from his Autobiography. Unfortunately, he failed to record exactly what he had for breakfast, lunch or supper that day.

Photo credit: Enjoyment Land