Drinking Lots of Water

Last week, I said I wanted to try to drink 48 ounces of water a day.

I thought I had found a cool tool on igoogle to track my water consumption, called Water Tracker.  This is what it looks like:

It seemed like it would be pretty cool.  It starts with 8 full glasses, and as you drink 8 ounces of water, you click on a glass to make it empty.   You are only able to do 8 ounces at a time (no half glasses).  It keeps track of the number of days you've been tracking your water.  Completed days are the days that you reached 64 oz.  Percentage is number of completed days over total days.  If you don't make it to 64 oz, it doesn't count.  It is good for keeping track of your daily water, but if you want to see that 2 days ago you only drank, say, 48 ounces - it won't do that for you.

Another way to keep track of your water is on The Daily Plate (now owned by Live Strong) - a free website (you can pay for a gold membership with added features).  I have only used the free site; it does require you to create an account with a log-in and password.

The page is kind of long so I broke it into two images.  Here's the top half of my page as of Thursday evening (before dinner)-

And here's the bottom half of the page, including the "Daily Water Consumption" over to the right.  You click on "Add A Glass" and it adds 8 ounces to your daily total.  This page will remember how much water you had, because it saves whatever you enter (i.e. a year later, I could come back to November 11, 2010 and see this).  It will provide you with weekly totals for food, but not water.

I don't use The Daily Plate daily, but I will enter what I eat for a couple days every few weeks to see if I have any glaring gaps in my diet, to see if I am eating enough protein, or if I'm eating too much of something bad.

Now to check in with how I've been with my water over the past week.  Here's a little graph. Check out my sweet Excel skills on Windows Live SkyDrive.  If I had actually paid for Microsoft Office on my mini laptop, I could wow you with more accurate Y-axis labeling.

Clearly, I've got plenty of room for improvement still!  This is strictly water; things like coconut water, milk, orange juice, etc. were not factored in.

Do you have any experience with the programs mentioned above?  

Or know of any others that are better?

PS- If you'd like a chance to win an Enell sports bra, check out the giveaway on Kim's blog, (Just) Trying is for Little Girls.  Here's a link to the giveaway post.