LISTEN TO ME!!! AND LISTEN CAREFULY BRO!
The absolutly BEST adviceI can give you is to buy a program called Pocket Diet Tracker. It's an amazing(!!!!) program for the Pocket PC (I hope you have one, and if not go and buy one! even used). Previously to using this program I used word and excel. BAD options! They consumed too much time to me, especially if you want variety in your diet!
This program has a big large database of predifined foods. Also, the greatest this is that you can enter you own foods and portions. You just take a look a food label and enter it into this intelligent program. I have entered many custom foods and cannot say enough about this. I can eat a different thing everyday. In fact, I don't have a fixed menu. You can just 'build' your menu on the fly by entering the data as you eat. This will allow you always to stay in touch with your log and see exactly what you ate, when you ate it, and what where the carb/fat/protein rations, sodium intake etc. It can also calculate the fat percentage loss and some other forumals there, but I just use the food database and log. I built several fixed menus to several friends this way within minutes, asking each what he likes and build it for him. I use a small electronic food scale(with a 1gram accuracy) that allows me to measure every food. This way, no one can beat my logs! I can tell you what exactly I ate on 11/21/2002 at 8:00am!, the calories are super precise if you also use a scale, the only thing that can cause inaccuracy this way is the manufacturer itself misleading labels, nothing else.