Losing weight is a pain in the a**.  So anything that makes it easier is a good thing.  I recently started using one of those good things, called MyNetDiary.  It's an app for iPhone / iPod / Android / Blackberry and can be tied to an account for their web page: https://www.mynetdiary.com/.  It's all free (ad-supported) and doesn't require an internet connection when working within the app.

I first read about MyNetDiary on Kotaku of all places.  http://kotaku.com/5919621/how-a-375+pound-lazy-gamer-lost-80-pounds-in-six-months  It was his review that got me interested.

I had had great success with FitDay, however it was a web only solution which led to 2 problems:
1) Had to wait till I could get to a computer to update my food journal, which was a nuisance and easily forgotten, and
2) Their web site has gotten steadily slower over time and more intolerable.

Since I stopped using FitDay, the weight has (not so slowly) crept back.  I needed something else to monitor my intake of delicious food.  Enter MyNetDiary.

With MyNetDiary, you first set it up with all your attributes (age, weight, daily level of activity, etc) and your target weight.  It will then figure out how many calories you should be eating to reach your target weight by an acceptable date.  You can adjust the date, but only to a point.  It won't let you pick unreasonable goals and set yourself up for failure.  Luckily I was able to set my target weight for this time next year, and still have ample daily calories to enjoy.

When I was using FitDay, I was hungry all the time.  It was quite distracting, and took a lot of will power.  I found myself constantly trying to squeeze the most out of every last calorie.  Conversely, MyNetDiary is forcing me to a more gradual change, and I haven't been hungry since I started using it.  Plus, I've usually been well below the daily allotment.

MyNetDiary tracks more than just calories though.  It tracks nutrients, weight, water intake (just tap a water drop icon for every glass you drink), exercise, and body measurements.

What I find very convenient is that the app works offline.  When I'm in a restaurant, I can just enter the food right there.  The built in database is huge and always seems to have the items I'm looking for (or a close substitute).  It even has a built in barcode scanner so you can just scan that bag of chips and be done with it.

The icons and menus are very friendly and well organised.  It feels like a lot of thought went into the design of the app, and it isn't just a portal for their web site.

Speaking of the web site, if you choose to link your app to the web, it will create an account for you on their site.  You can access all the same information using a browser.  It's a nice feature, but you aren't forced to use it.

The Good: Food Journal at your fingertips, any time, any where.  Well thought out app.  Forces realistic goals.
The Bad: It isn't obvious how to set the goals for other things, like fat or salt.  It tracks them, and has targets.  I just don't know where to set those targets currently.
The Ugly: The free version is ad-supported.  If it bugs you enough, you can pay for the premium version without ads.  Premium also comes with additional reporting features that I don't miss.

Their web site: https://www.mynetdiary.com/

UPDATE: The barcode scanning isn't really scanning.  It involves manually entering the numbers that appear on the UPC barcode.  None of the few items I tried had their barcodes on file, but you could link them to existing products in the database (which did actually hold the item I was scanning).  Frankly, it's less effort to just search for your item by name.  It's a decent search algorithm that looks for items containing all the terms you enter and does automatic stemming (so "strawberry" matches "strawberries").  Items you frequently use appear at the top of the list too.

Also, I found that to alter the calculated targets for anything but calories (such as fat, salt, etc) requires purchasing the premium version.

I still think the free version is very useful and will continue to stick with it.