Monday, March 31, 2003
Stay Fit and Trim: Personal Health & Diet Manager v2.5 Reviewed
Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 AM
So you've decided that you want to start a calorie controlled regime - be it for weight loss or gain ... but how on earth are you going to keep track of those calories? And what about the exercise? If you want to lose weight, a diet isn't going to be much help without exercise! Enter Personal Health & Diet Manager from Two Peaks Solutions ...
Personal Health & Diet Manager is a very well presented food and exercise management tool. It leads the user through the necessary initial steps, easing the initial learning curve. It comes with a wide-ranging database of nutritional information but it is very US-centric which may be a hindrance to customers outside of that country.
Getting started
After installing the software, the first thing you have to do is create a new profile. This provides the software with the information it needs to track your health. Entering a profile consists of going through some clearly labelled pages of information.
Figure 1: Initial personal information
You have the option of setting a diet goal, where you state your initial weight, what you'd like to weigh and by when. You can also specify your typical activity level so that the software can gauge how many calories you would burn without doing any further exercise.
Figure 2: Setting a diet goal
Entering this information and clicking on the Refresh button allows the software to tell you what your calorific intake has got to be in order to achieve the desired goal. When you've finished, you can enter any additional notes you require and password-protect the profile.
Two Peaks also provide a desktop version of the software. This synchronises with the Pocket PC version through its own Full/Quick Sync options.
Once a profile has been created, you are taken to the Daily Journal part of the software. This is the main section and, from here, you enter your meals, exercise and any other activity that might have an impact on your calories. At the start of each day, though, you should record your weight and any other health-related data you want to track. This can include how many hours you've slept and your pulse rate.
Figure 3: Daily journal health information
From your weight and the typical activity level you initially entered, the software calculates what your metabolism's calorific burn is going to be. Offset against this will be your calorific intake (your meals) and any exercise you do to help burn off additional calories.
Food, glorious food!
When it comes to recording your meals, the software guides you through the process. Step 1 gives you five options for specifying what you've eaten:
Figure 4: Entering meal information
If you choose from the favourite food list, the meal is entered straight away. If you choose from the list of commercial brands (e.g. Burger King, Starbucks, Wendy's), a second page is displayed of the products from that brand that the software knows about, as shown in Figure 5. Choosing an entry adds it to your journal.
Figure 5: Choosing a commercial food item
Choosing from a food group also takes you to a second step, where you must further refine your choice. Figure 6 shows the options open to you if you had chosen the "Bread, Cereal, Rice & Pasta" group. After choosing an entry from the food group, such as bread, you make your final selection as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 6: Choosing from a food group
Figure 7: Choosing a food item
If, however, you decide to manually enter the meal's information, you are presented with two screens - the details and the nutrients. The details allow you to record when and what you ate, and what size the portion was, as shown in Figure 8. The nutrients that you can record include calories, carbohydrates, fibre, fat and protein, as shown in Figure 9. If you are using a points-based diet such as Weight Watchers (tm), you can record the points here as well.
Figure 8: Meal information
Figure 9: Nutrient information
Although the core food database is quite comprehensive, there isn't much information on commercial food. It can also become tiresome making multiple entries for meals that might always be the same, such as breakfast. The software provides features for solving these issues, all accessible from the nutrient database tool.
Figure 10: Managing the nutrient database
Adding a new food item involves providing a description, the size of a default serving and what food group to save the item under. For each food item, you specify the nutrional information in the same way as manually entering a meal.
Figure 11: Adding a new food item
Editing or deleting an existing item in the database takes you through the same "food locating" process as entering a meal. Once you've found the entry, you can then edit the information (using the same forms as those used for adding an item) or delete it. Creating a custom meal is probably the most useful feature. Having entered a description to save the meal under, you can then assemble the meal from the nutrient database, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: Creating a custom meal
Feel the burn, baby!
It is very rare that controlling your calorific intake alone will allow you to control your weight. There will typically be a need for some daily exercise in order to help burn the excess calories. The software has a fairly long list of exercises to choose from, as can be seen in Figure 13.
Figure 13: Selecting your exercise
You can optionally enter your average heart rate and points, the latter being for a point-tracking diet scheme. You can also enter durations for different training zones. This information is not used by the software per se, but is principally a mechanism to allow you to track as much of your health as you want to. As you enter both meals and exercise during the day, the daily journal is updated to show how you are doing against your target calorific intake, as shown in Figure 14. The journal can also display the nutrient totals instead of the calorie information, as shown in Figure 15.
Figure 14: The daily journal
Figure 15: Nutrients instead of targets
Making the most of the data
Going to all this effort to work out what you've eaten and what exercise you've done would be a waste of time if you couldn't do much more with the information. Personal Health allows you to:
Figure 16: Tracking your weight over time
Gotchas
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for for $19.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This software will work on any Pocket PC or Pocket PC 2002 device. The program takes up 1757K of RAM on the device. It can be installed onto a storage card.
Conclusions
The software is very well designed - it has got a clean look and feel to it, and it is easy to navigate around the various parts. For any customers outside of the US, the software is going to be harder to use and Two Peaks might want to look at how they can increase the content of the supplied database. If you are looking to keep track of what you've eaten and what exercise you've done, this might well fit the bill.
Personal Health & Diet Manager is a very well presented food and exercise management tool. It leads the user through the necessary initial steps, easing the initial learning curve. It comes with a wide-ranging database of nutritional information but it is very US-centric which may be a hindrance to customers outside of that country.
Getting started
After installing the software, the first thing you have to do is create a new profile. This provides the software with the information it needs to track your health. Entering a profile consists of going through some clearly labelled pages of information.
Figure 1: Initial personal information
You have the option of setting a diet goal, where you state your initial weight, what you'd like to weigh and by when. You can also specify your typical activity level so that the software can gauge how many calories you would burn without doing any further exercise.
Figure 2: Setting a diet goal
Entering this information and clicking on the Refresh button allows the software to tell you what your calorific intake has got to be in order to achieve the desired goal. When you've finished, you can enter any additional notes you require and password-protect the profile.
Two Peaks also provide a desktop version of the software. This synchronises with the Pocket PC version through its own Full/Quick Sync options.
Once a profile has been created, you are taken to the Daily Journal part of the software. This is the main section and, from here, you enter your meals, exercise and any other activity that might have an impact on your calories. At the start of each day, though, you should record your weight and any other health-related data you want to track. This can include how many hours you've slept and your pulse rate.
Figure 3: Daily journal health information
From your weight and the typical activity level you initially entered, the software calculates what your metabolism's calorific burn is going to be. Offset against this will be your calorific intake (your meals) and any exercise you do to help burn off additional calories.
Food, glorious food!
When it comes to recording your meals, the software guides you through the process. Step 1 gives you five options for specifying what you've eaten:
- Choosing from a list of favourite food
- Searching the database
- Choosing from a list of commercial brands
- Choosing from a list of food groups
- Manually entering the nutritional information for the meal
Figure 4: Entering meal information
If you choose from the favourite food list, the meal is entered straight away. If you choose from the list of commercial brands (e.g. Burger King, Starbucks, Wendy's), a second page is displayed of the products from that brand that the software knows about, as shown in Figure 5. Choosing an entry adds it to your journal.
Figure 5: Choosing a commercial food item
Choosing from a food group also takes you to a second step, where you must further refine your choice. Figure 6 shows the options open to you if you had chosen the "Bread, Cereal, Rice & Pasta" group. After choosing an entry from the food group, such as bread, you make your final selection as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 6: Choosing from a food group
Figure 7: Choosing a food item
If, however, you decide to manually enter the meal's information, you are presented with two screens - the details and the nutrients. The details allow you to record when and what you ate, and what size the portion was, as shown in Figure 8. The nutrients that you can record include calories, carbohydrates, fibre, fat and protein, as shown in Figure 9. If you are using a points-based diet such as Weight Watchers (tm), you can record the points here as well.
Figure 8: Meal information
Figure 9: Nutrient information
Although the core food database is quite comprehensive, there isn't much information on commercial food. It can also become tiresome making multiple entries for meals that might always be the same, such as breakfast. The software provides features for solving these issues, all accessible from the nutrient database tool.
Figure 10: Managing the nutrient database
Adding a new food item involves providing a description, the size of a default serving and what food group to save the item under. For each food item, you specify the nutrional information in the same way as manually entering a meal.
Figure 11: Adding a new food item
Editing or deleting an existing item in the database takes you through the same "food locating" process as entering a meal. Once you've found the entry, you can then edit the information (using the same forms as those used for adding an item) or delete it. Creating a custom meal is probably the most useful feature. Having entered a description to save the meal under, you can then assemble the meal from the nutrient database, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: Creating a custom meal
Feel the burn, baby!
It is very rare that controlling your calorific intake alone will allow you to control your weight. There will typically be a need for some daily exercise in order to help burn the excess calories. The software has a fairly long list of exercises to choose from, as can be seen in Figure 13.
Figure 13: Selecting your exercise
You can optionally enter your average heart rate and points, the latter being for a point-tracking diet scheme. You can also enter durations for different training zones. This information is not used by the software per se, but is principally a mechanism to allow you to track as much of your health as you want to. As you enter both meals and exercise during the day, the daily journal is updated to show how you are doing against your target calorific intake, as shown in Figure 14. The journal can also display the nutrient totals instead of the calorie information, as shown in Figure 15.
Figure 14: The daily journal
Figure 15: Nutrients instead of targets
Making the most of the data
Going to all this effort to work out what you've eaten and what exercise you've done would be a waste of time if you couldn't do much more with the information. Personal Health allows you to:
- See graphs of how your weight is progressing, or how much you've slept, or what your pulse rate is
- Calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index) and your ideal weight
- Calculate your target heart rate
- Export the daily information (food intake, exercises and other data) as a CSV file
Figure 16: Tracking your weight over time
Gotchas
- Deleting an entry from the daily journal requires the "tap and hold" action to be held for the red dots to go round twice before a menu appears with "Delete" in it.
- The software doesn't allow you to enter half pound units for weights, although this can be done through the desktop version of the software.
- Quick Sync between the desktop & Pocket PC versions seems to be a bit hit and miss.
Entering a series of values into the desktop version resulted in some of them being missed by the quick synchronisation option. - The nutrional information that comes with the software is very US-centric. If you live outside of the US, you will need to spend some time teaching the software about the food you eat.
- The body-mass calculation seemed to get stuck on some arbitrary weight (180 lbs) that didn't match the weight information I'd put into the journal.
- The graph showing your progress of weight loss or gain could do with showing the target graph at the same time so that you can see how well (or not!) you are doing.
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for for $19.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This software will work on any Pocket PC or Pocket PC 2002 device. The program takes up 1757K of RAM on the device. It can be installed onto a storage card.
Conclusions
The software is very well designed - it has got a clean look and feel to it, and it is easy to navigate around the various parts. For any customers outside of the US, the software is going to be harder to use and Two Peaks might want to look at how they can increase the content of the supplied database. If you are looking to keep track of what you've eaten and what exercise you've done, this might well fit the bill.
