| I really enjoy Diet Analyst from Parsons Technology. Runs on IBM compatibles.
You answer a few questions about your self - age, sex, current weight and
whether or not you want to lose weight.
There are tons of foods already on lists to choose from by category: e.g.
cereal, fruit... and you can add some from the labels on your favorites
if you don't find them there. Many fast foods are also listed. You tell it
how much you ate of what in the day and it does an analysis across about
40 items - fats, carbohydrates, fiber, caffeine, vitamins, minerals,
protein etc. It also compares this to the "ideal" for you based on the
personal data you provided. It allows you to track exercise calories and
to post them against your total calories or not. You can add recipes
and things like Pat's Salad if you usually put the same things in a tossed
salad - saves alot of typing.
It does not tell you what to eat but it does let you sort through lists
from high to low to see how you could say add more fiber or zinc to your
diet. In the analysis, if you note you are too high on fats, you can
ask it to show you from high to low, what contributed to your fat calories
that day - this helps you see how you can change what you eat to decrease
the fat calories.
The software is pretty reasonable - I got it on sale for about $30, I think
it is usually about $40 but I'm not sure - got it 2 years ago.
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| There are other programs that do this sort of thing, too. I was using
one recently, can't remember the name, will look it up - it ran under
windows. It had a personal nutrition profile, would keep track of what
you each and calculate out fat, etc in recipes. Unfortunately the user
interface was awful, so it was hard to use, but presumbly if you got
good at it, it would go faster.
Also, Cooking Light magazine uses a program to do the calculations on
their recipes. The tell which program in the back of the magazine -
might want to look in to that.
I have found all these sorts of things harder to use then a good book
of food values and a notebook.
Diana
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