PDAction

It’s summertime and our first thoughts are for hanging out at the beach in a bathing suit. Unfortunately, our second thoughts are for the extra pounds we put on over the winter. It’s time to lose some weight. One of the key components of a successful weight-loss program is tracking: weight lost, calories consumed, kilometres jogged, etc.

Enter the Handheld Diet Diary for Palm OS from CalorieKing. Handheld Diet Diary provides a convenient means of keeping on top of your weight-loss progress using Palm OS hardware, including the Treo 650 and T5.

Getting started with the application is quite simple. When you run Diet Diary for the first time, you are presented with a wizard that steps you through creating a profile. You enter some personal data, age, gender, height, weight, and current activity level and Diet Diary returns a recommended weight-loss goal and the daily calorie intake required to meet that goal. Then you eat and exercise as recommended and track your progress.

The first big feature of the software is the database. CalorieKing claims to have the largest and most comprehensive food database available. And, at 50,000+ entries, they may be right. I haven’t yet had a food entry to make that wasn’t covered in some way by the database. Not only are standard grocery items listed, but there is good coverage for many fast-food and restaurant outlets. The 50,000+ entries database is not static. Each week, CalorieKing posts an updated version for users to download .

Users can also track calories burned through exercise. The database includes an extensive list of exercises. Selecting the exercise and time spent subtracts calories from the daily total.

Keeping an eye on the number of calories consumed or burned during a day is not helpful if you cannot track pounds lost. Select the Weight Check-in option and enter your weight. As you continue, you can monitor your progress via reports and charts. If you are syncing with the CalorieKing Desktop client, you can also track inches lost on your arms, waist, thighs, etc.

Diet Diary produces simple reports of your progress. You can read a simple chart listing weight loss by date or view a line graph showing weight change over time.

Some of my pros and cons with Handheld Diet Diary

Pros:

• Extensive food and exercise database, updated regularly.
• The ability to add to that database. If you eat some rare or exotic food not included in the database, you can create your own entry with all the available nutritional information.
• You can create “meals” in the database. If you eat the same breakfast Monday to Friday, you can create a database item called breakfast, add all the components of that meal and enter it into your log each day with a single tap.
• Supports many diet types. If low-carb is your thing, the database entries list the nutritional content of the foods.

Cons:

• Brand, store and restaurant names are USA-centric. In dairy, for example, many Canadian brands are different from those sold in the U.S. There is an Australian version of CalorieKing and it seems to focus on Aussie brands.
• User-entered database items don’t sort alphabetically. If you only enter a few items this is moot, but digging through a larger number of entries could be time consuming. There is a search feature to the database that might offset some of that.
• Lack of metric measures. While you can enter your weight and height in metric, the food and exercise database is all imperial. Again, in Canada, our food packaging is measured in metric. Those of us old enough to remember pre-metric days can make basic conversions in our heads. Users under a certain age would not know what an ounce or a mile might be.

Of course, the biggest “con” of this or any, weight-tracking software, is that it won’t guarantee you will lose weight. However, if you are determined to look good in that bathing suit, this is a great tool to help keep your weight loss on track.

Tags: Diet, Health and Fitness, Weight Loss