Sunday, January 26, 2003
Review of Pocket Diet Tracker v2.41
Posted by Jimmy Dodd in "SOFTWARE" @ 02:00 PM
The holidays have come and gone and, at least here in the United States, the yearly ritual has begun. Of course I’m talking about overeating during the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, and then resolving to lose weight for the new year. Well this year enlist your Pocket PC to help you win the “Battle of the Bulge”. Pocket Diet Tracker v2.41 from Tiny Tech Software is a dietary journal and nutritional database that makes it easier to track your progress. So put down that jelly donut and let’s take a look.
Pocket Diet Tracker v 2.41 from Tiny Tech Software is a dietary journal and nutritional database that lets you set goals for losing weight, track your progress, and provide information at your fingertips for making healthy meal choices.
Entering Your Personal Data
The first thing to do on your initial use of Pocket Diet Tracker is to configure your Profile Settings. You can store more than one profile setting and selecting from among them is done with a quick menu selection. Pocket Diet Tracker automatically opens the last used profile when you start it up so it's quick to open, jot down some info, and move on to other matters. Your profile consists of your name, height, age, and gender. Your diet plan consists of a starting date, a starting weight, a target weight, and how much weight you want to lose per week. The latter setting confused me for a moment as I expected to set the target date by which I wanted to lose the weight. Pocket Diet Tracker takes a more level-headed approach by making you specify how much weight you want to lose per week and calculates the target date from that once you tap the Apply menu button. Since most diet plans suggest how much weight you should safely lose per week, this makes more sense. If you want to do it the other way (“How much weight will I have to lose per week to weigh 180 pounds by my class reunion?”), you can back calculate it manually or use a trial and error method to find an acceptable set of values.
Figure 1: Profile Editor
Once your profile is entered you can go ahead and view your Body Mass Index. BMI can be an issue of fierce contention so if you don’t wish to use it you don’t have to. Pocket Diet Tracker doesn’t rely on the BMI for any of its tracking, although it will calculate it for you and it does show up in some graphs.
Figure 2: The Body Mass Index Dialog
Setting your Diet Goals is the next step. This is where the help of a dietician or diet plan is needed in helping you determine what goals you want to meet or what limits you want to avoid exceeding. The values you enter when setting up your Diet Goals affect the reporting module’s results later. You can use most of the application without setting these values by simply tracking what you do eat. This might be a better option for initial use since most of us have no idea how much we consume. It also works well if you are just trying to lower one or two categories (fat and cholesterol are obvious choices).
Figure 3: The Diet Goals Editor
Once you’ve set your Diet Goals you can set your Meal Patterns. The Meal Pattern is a simple dialog that allows you to specify which meals and snacks you eat and what time you eat them, as well as what percent of your total food intake for the day that meal represents. The data obtained here is used in the reporting module in “Real Time Mode” as it allows you to watch your daily dietary goals based on the time of day. We’ll look at the effects of Diet Goals and Meal Patterns later.
Figure 4: The Meals Pattern Editor
The Nutrient Diary
The Nutrient Diary is where you log your nutrient intake as well as your daily exercise routines. Entering exercises is handled in a relatively straightforward manner. You simply select the exercise from a built in list and note the duration of the exercise. There didn’t seem to be any way to add exercises to the list short of hacking into the database and manually entering one. Once you’ve entered the duration and tapped OK, the entry shows up in the diary with a calculated number of calories burned. The event is time stamped but this can be modified easily later for those of us who don’t carry our Pocket PC into the sauna.
Adding a meal takes a few more steps. A built in database allows for selection from a large database of generic foods. This is a good start, but you’ll probably want to enter your own values based on the nutrition guides now sported by most products. A handy search function lets you search for meal items by name as well. There is also a “Recent Meals” menu function to pop up a list of recently entered meals in case you habitually eat the same things. Entering meal information is always the most troublesome area of any diet plan until you have built up your own “favorites” list.
The Nutrient Diary is also where you log your daily weight. Pocket Diet tracker doesn’t display weights of 0 in the graphs, so if you can log your weights in whatever interval you wish. This is handy since diet plans where people only weigh themselves weekly would otherwise be a spikey graph that gave little indication of trends.
Optional features include setting up warnings and filters for the Nutrient Diary. Warnings pop up a dialog box advising you that you have exceeded one or more selected category limits. Filters simply don’t show you meal items in the database that exceed the limits you have set. These features can be turned on or off independently and would be a great help in meal planning.
Also, optional parameters can be configured to show up in the same column as weight, such as blood pressure, hours of sleep, heart rate, etc. These can be used to track any other parameter on an up to daily basis.
Figure 5: The Nutrient Diary
Tracking and Analyzing
The real value of this type of product is in tracking your progress (or, in my case, lack thereof). Pocket Diet Tracker provides three different types of feedback: Reports, Graphs, and a Weight Tracker.
Reports compare your nutritional goals (which you set in your profile) versus actual consumption (as recorded in your nutritional diary) and gives you your raw data in a table. There are three default time spans: today, the last week, and the last month. Any date span may be selected, however. Using the today option gives you a report up to the current time and takes into account the Meal Patterns you set up in your profile earlier. Thus, if you allocate only 50% of your caloric intake by lunch, and your report shows that you’ve already hit 70%, you can adjust your eating for the remainder of the day to stay within your limits. Report information can be exported to a csv file for further analysis, if desired.
Figure 6: The Reports Dialog
Graphs display much of the same information as reports but they show up in two nutritional categories as bar or line graphs versus their goal values. There is no graph that shows intraday values like there is for reports so you can only plot totals for each day. You can also plot weight or any of the optional parameters you enter in the Diary. So you could plot your sodium intake versus blood pressure, for example.
The only drawback to the graphs is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to save the configuration. If you view more than one pair daily you will probably get tired of having to set all four combo boxes for each pair.
Figure 7: The Graph Dialog
The third tool for tracking your progress is the Weight Tracker. This graph shows your goal weight (a straight line from the beginning weight to the target weight), your current progress (a curve of the daily weights entered in the nutrition diary), and an estimated curve based on your current progress. Also shown is your current weight, your current BMI, the weight loss rate required to reach your target weight, your suggested daily caloric intake, and your target date.
Figure 8: The Weight Tracker Dialog
Gotchas
Pocket Diet Tracker is not designed to work with a particular diet plan and as such doesn’t tell you what to eat, how much to exercise, etc. It simply gives you an easy way to enter your dietary information and a large selection of reports and graphs to track and analyze it. As such, it can be used with any diet plan. If you need direction on how to improve your health through better nutrition you’ll have to look elsewhere (like maybe your doctor).
Where To Buy
A 15 day trial version of Pocket Diet Tracker can be downloaded from Handango (affiliate) or purchased for $24.95.
Conclusions
Overall, the Pocket Diet Tracker is an easy-to-use tracking device for measuring progress toward reaching your dietary goals. It is flexible enough to use with almost any diet plan that is based on calorie counting or category percentages, and you can use it to track your nutrition and weight before even deciding on a plan. Having the database built-in and easy to expand means that you only have to carry your Pocket PC, not a dietary reference book.
Pocket Diet Tracker v 2.41 from Tiny Tech Software is a dietary journal and nutritional database that lets you set goals for losing weight, track your progress, and provide information at your fingertips for making healthy meal choices.
Entering Your Personal Data
The first thing to do on your initial use of Pocket Diet Tracker is to configure your Profile Settings. You can store more than one profile setting and selecting from among them is done with a quick menu selection. Pocket Diet Tracker automatically opens the last used profile when you start it up so it's quick to open, jot down some info, and move on to other matters. Your profile consists of your name, height, age, and gender. Your diet plan consists of a starting date, a starting weight, a target weight, and how much weight you want to lose per week. The latter setting confused me for a moment as I expected to set the target date by which I wanted to lose the weight. Pocket Diet Tracker takes a more level-headed approach by making you specify how much weight you want to lose per week and calculates the target date from that once you tap the Apply menu button. Since most diet plans suggest how much weight you should safely lose per week, this makes more sense. If you want to do it the other way (“How much weight will I have to lose per week to weigh 180 pounds by my class reunion?”), you can back calculate it manually or use a trial and error method to find an acceptable set of values.
Figure 1: Profile Editor
Once your profile is entered you can go ahead and view your Body Mass Index. BMI can be an issue of fierce contention so if you don’t wish to use it you don’t have to. Pocket Diet Tracker doesn’t rely on the BMI for any of its tracking, although it will calculate it for you and it does show up in some graphs.
Figure 2: The Body Mass Index Dialog
Setting your Diet Goals is the next step. This is where the help of a dietician or diet plan is needed in helping you determine what goals you want to meet or what limits you want to avoid exceeding. The values you enter when setting up your Diet Goals affect the reporting module’s results later. You can use most of the application without setting these values by simply tracking what you do eat. This might be a better option for initial use since most of us have no idea how much we consume. It also works well if you are just trying to lower one or two categories (fat and cholesterol are obvious choices).
Figure 3: The Diet Goals Editor
Once you’ve set your Diet Goals you can set your Meal Patterns. The Meal Pattern is a simple dialog that allows you to specify which meals and snacks you eat and what time you eat them, as well as what percent of your total food intake for the day that meal represents. The data obtained here is used in the reporting module in “Real Time Mode” as it allows you to watch your daily dietary goals based on the time of day. We’ll look at the effects of Diet Goals and Meal Patterns later.
Figure 4: The Meals Pattern Editor
The Nutrient Diary
The Nutrient Diary is where you log your nutrient intake as well as your daily exercise routines. Entering exercises is handled in a relatively straightforward manner. You simply select the exercise from a built in list and note the duration of the exercise. There didn’t seem to be any way to add exercises to the list short of hacking into the database and manually entering one. Once you’ve entered the duration and tapped OK, the entry shows up in the diary with a calculated number of calories burned. The event is time stamped but this can be modified easily later for those of us who don’t carry our Pocket PC into the sauna.
Adding a meal takes a few more steps. A built in database allows for selection from a large database of generic foods. This is a good start, but you’ll probably want to enter your own values based on the nutrition guides now sported by most products. A handy search function lets you search for meal items by name as well. There is also a “Recent Meals” menu function to pop up a list of recently entered meals in case you habitually eat the same things. Entering meal information is always the most troublesome area of any diet plan until you have built up your own “favorites” list.
The Nutrient Diary is also where you log your daily weight. Pocket Diet tracker doesn’t display weights of 0 in the graphs, so if you can log your weights in whatever interval you wish. This is handy since diet plans where people only weigh themselves weekly would otherwise be a spikey graph that gave little indication of trends.
Optional features include setting up warnings and filters for the Nutrient Diary. Warnings pop up a dialog box advising you that you have exceeded one or more selected category limits. Filters simply don’t show you meal items in the database that exceed the limits you have set. These features can be turned on or off independently and would be a great help in meal planning.
Also, optional parameters can be configured to show up in the same column as weight, such as blood pressure, hours of sleep, heart rate, etc. These can be used to track any other parameter on an up to daily basis.
Figure 5: The Nutrient Diary
Tracking and Analyzing
The real value of this type of product is in tracking your progress (or, in my case, lack thereof). Pocket Diet Tracker provides three different types of feedback: Reports, Graphs, and a Weight Tracker.
Reports compare your nutritional goals (which you set in your profile) versus actual consumption (as recorded in your nutritional diary) and gives you your raw data in a table. There are three default time spans: today, the last week, and the last month. Any date span may be selected, however. Using the today option gives you a report up to the current time and takes into account the Meal Patterns you set up in your profile earlier. Thus, if you allocate only 50% of your caloric intake by lunch, and your report shows that you’ve already hit 70%, you can adjust your eating for the remainder of the day to stay within your limits. Report information can be exported to a csv file for further analysis, if desired.
Figure 6: The Reports Dialog
Graphs display much of the same information as reports but they show up in two nutritional categories as bar or line graphs versus their goal values. There is no graph that shows intraday values like there is for reports so you can only plot totals for each day. You can also plot weight or any of the optional parameters you enter in the Diary. So you could plot your sodium intake versus blood pressure, for example.
The only drawback to the graphs is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to save the configuration. If you view more than one pair daily you will probably get tired of having to set all four combo boxes for each pair.
Figure 7: The Graph Dialog
The third tool for tracking your progress is the Weight Tracker. This graph shows your goal weight (a straight line from the beginning weight to the target weight), your current progress (a curve of the daily weights entered in the nutrition diary), and an estimated curve based on your current progress. Also shown is your current weight, your current BMI, the weight loss rate required to reach your target weight, your suggested daily caloric intake, and your target date.
Figure 8: The Weight Tracker Dialog
Gotchas
Pocket Diet Tracker is not designed to work with a particular diet plan and as such doesn’t tell you what to eat, how much to exercise, etc. It simply gives you an easy way to enter your dietary information and a large selection of reports and graphs to track and analyze it. As such, it can be used with any diet plan. If you need direction on how to improve your health through better nutrition you’ll have to look elsewhere (like maybe your doctor).
Where To Buy
A 15 day trial version of Pocket Diet Tracker can be downloaded from Handango (affiliate) or purchased for $24.95.
Conclusions
Overall, the Pocket Diet Tracker is an easy-to-use tracking device for measuring progress toward reaching your dietary goals. It is flexible enough to use with almost any diet plan that is based on calorie counting or category percentages, and you can use it to track your nutrition and weight before even deciding on a plan. Having the database built-in and easy to expand means that you only have to carry your Pocket PC, not a dietary reference book.
