Mark poked around with the tongs as he carefully analyzed the salad. He saw some baby tomatoes and found a chunk of blue cheese underneath the lettuce. He knew that cheese would make a big difference, and factoring in the vinaigrette dressing, he made his guess: “110?” Shaking her head, Jane exclaimed, “Nope, only 75!” Salad was always tricky, but with all of this practice, he was much getting better at it.

Counting calories is a task that’s usually associated with people who obsessively keep track of everything they eat to shed a few more pounds. For the rest of us, we’re aware of calories, but we know very little about the calorie content in the food we eat. It’s no surprise that eating well and maintaining a healthy weight are two of the most important steps we can take to live longer, healthier lives. But knowing this, how does the vague notion of “eating well” actually translate into our day-to-day eating habits? What should we be eating, and where do our calories come from?

At every meal in the office during the week, we’ve been taking turns guessing how many calories are in a single serving of each dish. Our food is prepared by our talented chef, and each of her recipes is saved online with service called DailyBurn that automatically breaks down the number of calories per serving, as well as lots of information about the nutritional value about the dish. You can see a sample meal listed here: WorkSmart Labs lunch 2/2/10.

And just because we’re eating healthy food doesn’t mean that the meals aren’t delicious. Our chef has done a wonderful job filling every meal with color, variety and taste. Browse through the photos below to see what we’ve been eating.

As a company, our mission has always been to make wellness a seamlessly enjoyable part of everyday life. But if we expect our users to be eating healthy, then we had better put our money food where our mouth is. We sympathize with anyone who has found that recording everything they eat throughout the day is a difficult and frustrating task. However, counting calories is one of the best ways to start taking control of one’s eating habits, and that’s exactly why we’re doing it: we want to understand this challenge better so we can find ways to make it easier. Our little ”calorie guessing game” is just an example of how we approach these kinds of problems before trying to solve them. Whether it be nutrition or fitness, we want to exemplify the healthy lifestyle that we are promoting through our products and technology.

We are excited to announce that we have just released CardioTrainer v2.1! Here is an overview of what’s new:

Automatic Crash Recovery
We know how frustrating it is when CardioTrainer closes during a workout. This is a complex issue because sometimes Android simply *has* to close one of the apps if you have many running at once. With this update, CardioTrainer will automatically restore your track if the application is closed by the system, or if your phone turns off while recording a workout (if it’s out of battery, for example). For those of you who saw CardioTrainer crashing because of memory problems, we hope that the fix will help with this problem. This is our first attempt at a complex solution, so we would love to hear how well we did.

Graphical History
We’ve overhauled the the look and feel of the the workout history screen. All of your stats are now arranged for easy comparison, along with a visualization of how many calories were burned in each workout. You can still select and individual workouts to see the map and other statistics. We have also introduced a long click (press and hold) to delete and resend individual tracks. Please let us know how you like it.

New Splash Screen
When you open CardioTrainer after installing the update, you’ll be greeted by our new welcome screen with a quick overview of how to use CardioTrainer and a list of features. You’ll only see this the first time you open the application, and it will hopefully give our first time users a better idea of how to use CardioTrainer. If anything looks incorrect or unclear, please let us know.

We really want to know what you think of these changes, so as always, please share any questions or comments with us.

Happy exercising!
The WorkSmart Labs family