Nutrition is the science of nourishing the body and the art of giving serious thought to what you're consuming. While your body has an innate ability to sense when you need to eat, it hasn't the slightest idea what you should eat. Good nutrition is first and foremost a lifestyle. Just as lifting weights for the first time won't instantly give you a huge muscular frame, eating a nutritious meal won't suddenly make you feel happier and healthier.

The first step is to be conscious that everything you eat and drink is affecting your life. Once you've made a conscious connection (such as "gee, those 10 cups of coffee a day sure are making me tired in the morning") you can start taking your diet seriously.

The next and most important step is to start looking carefully at the nutritional value (or lack thereof) of what you're eating and drinking. We've provided some tools on this site to help you analyze what you're eating:

• Before going anywhere else, you should have gone to the Nutritional Profile Generator. Maybe you should go RIGHT NOW. (Hint, Hint). (Your profile has been set already, don't worry) Give it some quick information about yourself (that we keep strictly confidential) and it will determine what sorts of nutritional needs you have. Once you've been there, your nutritional profile will be saved for later use with other tools. Also, the pages on this server will change dynamically to provide you with information relevant to your specific needs.
• The Food Counter is a tool for counting up what you ate today. Ever wonder if you were getting enough calcium or too much fat? Here's your chance to find out!
• The Food Planner is a close cousin of the Food Counter, oriented towards planning out your next meal. You can add or remove foods to a scratchpad and see how nutritious the whole combination is. The scratchpad is stored in your configuration settings, so you can come back to the scratchpad at any time and pick up where you left off.

  Tip: Enter your meals into the scratchpad one at a time throughout your day. By the end of the day you'll have all the statistics on what you ate today, and how it compares to your ideal food consumption!

• All of our tools use a Food Database based on freely distributable information from the USDA and further supplemented to include common junk foods and fast foods. You can Search the database for a specific food, or Add a new food to the database.
• If you've had an experience regarding Nutrition you'd like to share, you can submit your two cents to our Testimonials Archive. If you don't have anything to say, you can visit the archive and see what others have to say.
• Looking for advice? You will probably have luck on our Message Board, where you can freely discuss anything relating to Nutrition.

Once you're conscious of exactly how much nutrients you are consuming every day, it's important to understand what role each one plays in maintaining your health. We've provided a library of nutrient profiles for all the major nutrients: what they are, how much you need, and how they affect you.