CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, Day 7

 

 

Today I tried setting the program up for multiple users.

 

When you select “Create User” from the “Users” menu, the initial user registration window pops up again. Enter the user’s name, birth date, weight, and other vitals, and you’re in business. No problems.

 

After you create a new user, his or her name appears along with your own in the “Users” menu. To change from your food diary to theirs, simply select the other name from that menu.

 

As I remember from the documentation, CalorieKing supports up to five users. Personally, I find this an arbitrary limit. Considering this program costs almost $50, I don’t see why I should be facing any limits in the number of users I track.

 

As you are limited to recording on one computer by the fact that this is a standalone rather than web-based program, it seems illogical that anyone would use the software for any group not based within the same household. No diet support group is going to track all its members with one copy, for example, because the scattered members wouldn’t be able to type their daily intake into the remote computer.

 

However, there are households with more than five people out there — I grew up in a family of eight myself. If Mom or Dad is concerned with family nutrition, she or he would have to make a second copy of the program on another computer to enter the last three kids, in violation of the license agreement.

 

Why create criminals? Remove the limit!

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, Day 6

 

 

Decision time should be coming soon — I believe this is only a seven-day demo. I’ll have to start coming up with some overall conclusions.

 

Today’s featured feature for review is Saved Meals. This program gives you the option to save a group of foods together as “the usual,” so to speak. Say you often have a cup of Cheerios with half a cup of milk for breakfast. Enter the foods into your breakfast box in CalorieKing as normal, then click over to the “Saved Meals” tab. Choose “New,” then select which meal you want to save (breakfast, in this case). Name it (“Cheerios with milk”), and it’s yours forever.

 

Tomorrow when you eat that same breakfast, you can save a few milliseconds by dragging over the meal in one shot rather than searching for and portioning the Cheerios and milk over again.

 

Every little bit counts, whether it be time or calories.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, Day 5

Today was the first time I actually put some exercise in the appropriate box in CalorieKing (I know, I’m a slug). It’s highly convenient to be able to simply search for the exercise in the program’s long list of activities and then enter the number of minutes you engaged in it.

 

Did I mention that CalorieKing uses live searching? It automatically narrows the list as you type, so you generally don’t have to bother typing the whole word before what you’re looking for pops up.

 

On the topic of searching, here’s a tip: The database used by the program generally follows an increasing-specificity format. For example, skim milk would be “Milk: Cow, Fat-free, skim.” As opposed to, perhaps, “Milk: Goat’s milk, whole.” You can narrow in on what you’re looking for oftentimes by typing in that format, although sometimes it’s inconsistent and the punctuation can be a gotcha.

 

Anyway, back to exercise. I assume that the exercise calculation is taking into account your basal metabolic rate, something the start-up interview asked for info to use in calculating. Still, that’s not clear from the interface, and the program never tells you outright how many calories it thinks you’re burning each day just from existing.

 

What I’m wondering is, is that 100 calories the program said I burned by walking for 30 minutes 100 above and beyond what I’d normally burn just sitting around or standing at the kitchen counter, or not? Would it be a value of 100 calories for someone with a different metabolic rate?

 

The program knocks the amount of calories you’ve exercised off your total consumed for the day. Convenient if you want to stay under the total yet still have that banana split.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, Day 4

So I investigated the “Publish Diary” option, and it’s something you only have access to if you subscribe to the CalorieKing Club, just like the meal plans. And that’s just fine with me — I’d rather the world didn’t know if I’ve had a croissant instead of oatmeal for breakfast (but I make it up later, I swear!)

 

On the other hand, signing up for the club might guilt one into making even healthier choices. But then, seeing the calorie and nutrition counts for my food intake is already doing a pretty good job of encouraging me to eat better, slowly but surely.

 

For example, I’ve noticed I tend to hit or exceed the max fat in my plan most days, whereas I fall short in protein and fiber. Thus, I’m taking it upon myself to seek out foods higher in protein and fiber, such as beans and fresh fruit.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, Day 3

I continue to have an agreeable experience with the program, although I wonder if it will ever pop up a tip besides “check in once a week.”

 

I find myself increasingly checking the program for nutrition information on foods I read about or consider making for myself. It’s convenient to be able to search for how much popcorn I can eat for around 100 calories, for example.

 

I noticed today that there’s a button to publish your diary. As I’m not sure I want others to be peaking at my daily food intake, I haven’t tested this yet . . . but maybe I’ll see what I can learn tomorrow.

 

Also, there’s another button on the toolbar that connects you to meal plans provided by your CalorieKing Club account, should you happen to be a member. I’m not, but the cost isn’t so steep ($7 a month or $55 a year), so if set meal plans and online support forums help keep you on track, it might be worthwhile. It’s less expensive than Weight Watchers’ online service.

 

Maybe I need some help to stay on track — I’m within my calorie count for the day, but I did choose to eat a handful of cookies over something more nutritious for a snack. Oops.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager: Day 2

No more grief from the program today about check-ins more frequent than once a week. My check-in for today went flawlessly. Those tip boxes must only show up the first time you try a feature.

 

As for check-ins, the program lets you record your weight (in pounds or kilograms, depending on what you set as your preference when you started the program), your steps for the day as measured by a pedometer, your waist, hip, and thigh measurements, and a journal entry. The journal entry box is just a free-form text box. I suppose it’s useful if you’re the type who likes to keep track of other notes about your progress or likes having some private soul-searching. As of yet, I’m not sure if there’s further use for journal entries.

 

Unless you’re willing to make the effort to measure your servings (somehow) when you eat out somewhere not covered in the program’s database, you have to be prepared to make estimates when entering your meal data. We had lunch at Ikea Slovakia’s café today, and believe it or not, there’s not an entry for that Eastern European specialty, Large Block of Breaded and Fried Non-Mozzarella Cheese. I marked it as three fried cheese sticks and hoped I was close.

 

I must admit, I felt a little guilty and put my lunch salad in the “Breakfast” box. I know you’re not supposed to skip breakfast but . . . well, it’s only my second day, I can improve. However, it’s a good reminder to not skip meals having the foods separated into groups. The Diary screen also has boxes for Snacks and Exercise.

 

CalorieKing doesn’t limit itself to tracking only your calories. The Diary keeps tabs on your carbohydrate, fat, protein, and fiber intake as well in a little sideways bar graph in the lower left-hand corner. You can also track your fluid intake and your exercise minutes for the day. The program can calculate how many calories you burn through exercise, it seems — it has a database of exercises along with its nutritional database.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager: Day 1

It’s no secret I think to anyone who’s seen me since college that I need to lose some weight.

I was doing pretty well on the weight front for many years, staying under 140 in high school and at least staying at or under 150 (the barrier between “healthy weight” and “overweight” for my height) in college.

Of course, keeping that high school weight seemed to involve eating like a bird — I somehow had the self-discipline back then to limit myself to a next-to-nothing breakfast and a bagel with a single-serve cream cheese for lunch most days. (Of course, I know now that I could have eaten more had I been choosing healthier foods for lunch, but in high school I didn’t really have many creative ideas for lunches at my disposal.)

At any rate, I now have surpassed that 150 mark for two-plus years running, thanks to the stress of teaching and being totally on my own. There’s nothing like having no structured meal plans to lead you down the path to fast food takeout several days a week, and for me anyway, there’s nothing like stress to send you to the chips aisle at the grocery store.

To rein in my fast food and salty snack indulgences as my wedding approached (I faced the distinct possibility of not being able to squeeze into the dress I’d bought 10-15 pounds ago), I started keeping a food diary. Along with weekly meal planning, calorie tracking has to be one of the most effective strategies I’ve found for making my diet consistently healthier. I lost enough pounds over the course of a few months (between the food diary and working out at Curves) that I managed to zip up my dress on the big day (albeit with little breathing room — I waited too long to start dieting).

Unfortunately, I fell off the food diary bandwagon once the wedding festivities got going and I was faced with a lot of meals out with the family and parties. I knew that I didn’t have much control over the food options, so I just kind of shrugged tracking off.

The honeymoon on a cruise ship surely did away with any weight loss that I might have maintained through the wedding season. Gourmet meals nightly? Unlimited food, 24/7? Oh yeah!

I’m also a total weakling on top of all this. I have determined through attempts at exercise that I must have no muscle tone left at all. I’m surprised I can even type.

On the plus side (ha), I’m not in the obese range. I have about 18 pounds to lose to squeak into the healthy zone, which isn’t so bad that I feel hopeless. Of course, I’d like to lose more and fit into the sizes I used to wear, but one step at a time.

Thus, I went looking for a food diary program for my computer. I had been using a free web site for tracking before, but it has the disadvantages of requiring an active Internet connection (which can be spotty here) and requiring frequent logging in. It wasn’t an elegant solution, and as a Mac user, I demand elegant solutions.

I saw CalorieKing recommended on one of my new favorite web pages, Hungry Girl. I’d seen it before but not tried their system since it required payment, plus I believe at the time they didn’t offer their software package for the Mac. But now there’s a free 7-day trial of their calorie, exercise and weight tracking program downloadable for both Mac and Windows.

I had to give it a try. It sounded like just what I’d been Googling for.

For now, I’ll note a few impressions briefly, leaving the bulk of the reviewing for future days when I’m not preoccupied with telling the story of my life.

First, I like the interface so far. It’s fast, responsive, and easy to figure out. The food database is extensive, though it can be picky about search words. The program always allows you to specify in exact grams or ounces how much you’ve eaten, which is so convenient when using a scale to measure portions.

What I don’t appreciate so far is that it has suggested to me that I only “check in” with my measurements once a week. I’ve read about studies that show people who weigh themselves every day are better at maintaining weight loss, and I believe in staying vigilant. I’ll report tomorrow on whether the suggestion is merely that or if the program enforces infrequency.

Recipe Organizers for the Mac

I got my first Mac laptop (an iBook G3, the white version, not the colorful toilet-seat kind) my sophomore year of college, after my Compaq laptop’s electrical system crapped out. Of course, I’d been begging for a Mac for years, only to be shot down by the “It costs too much!” argument again and again. I only secured that iBook by promising to pay for half of it myself out of my work-study funds.

Being even then a Food Network addict and cooking fan, I decided I needed to have a recipe organizer, like that program MasterCook we had an old version of sitting around on a CD somewhere at home. I started searching and could only come across some “program” that was really a FileMaker database souped-up with AppleScripts and something new called Yum that exemplified the cliché, “You get what you pay for.” Back then, OS X shareware development was slow going, as the Jaguar version running on my spiffy new iBook was only the first iteration people were willing to try en masse.

Scott to the rescue! My sweetie uncovered MacGourmet, a program still in beta but with an actually usable and attractive interface. It was sort of like iTunes, and thankfully, it ran natively on OS X. He bought me a license as a present when the program went final, which was a good idea, as I was already hooked.

Fast forward several years, and I still have MacGourmet storing all the recipes I download from the Internet. It’s progressed greatly from that beta I started with, and entering recipes from the web is now extremely fast and easy. My library has been growing by leaps and bounds since version 2 arrived.

Over at TidBITS, a reviewer looked at 10 Mac recipe organizers (I found the link over on MacGourmet.com). Ten! We’ve come a long way. You can read the article, but note that MacGourmet came up as the favorite. I picked the right horse, I guess.

I add my recommendation to Andy Affleck’s.

Recipes I post on this site will more often than not come with a MacGourmet file available for download into your library, should you also have the program. To learn more, visit the MacGourmet site.