Best Diet Software?

Nutrition Health Center

What’s the Best Calorie Counter Guide?

By Terry Dunkle*

A good calorie counter guide will not only keep track of your calories, but do a lot more to keep you healthy as you lose weight. My company makes a leading brand (it’s advertised elsewhere on this page), but my purpose is to educate, not to sell. Here’s what to look for when shopping for such a guide:

Food Database

Don’t bother with a guide that covers fewer than 20,000 foods. You’ll find at least that many in most supermarkets these days. Make sure the guide makers aren’t inflating their food count by including duplicates under alternative names (“oatmeal” and “oats, for example). And beware of online guides that let users contribute foods to the database by keying in label facts. These are usually riddled with duplicates and incorrectly entered numbers.

Exercise Database

Besides tracking what you eat, a calorie counter guide should award you extra calories for exercise. Choose one that covers at least 500 activities, from sports to leisure activities to occupations. Make sure it factors your calorie burn for your current weight. If you’re lucky, you’ll find one (like DietPower) that also tracks water loss through exercise.

Based on 20 years of research by DietPower, Inc., this calculator is accurate to 5 percent for most users. (It's not for people who are pregnant or have metabolic disorders. Always see a doctor before starting a diet.)

Birth Date

Sex

Tobacco user?

Height

Weight

Goal Weight

Target Date

Email Address

Close Goal Weight

Your Goal Weight is the weight you want to achieve. (If it's a lot different from your current weight, you might want to set a goal that represents only the first step. Even a 10-percent weight loss will significantly improve your health.)

Close Target Date

Plan on losing no more than a pound or two per week. Otherwise, you may eat too little for good nutrition and your weight loss may be temporary.

Close Lactating?

If you are breastfeeding, check this box and the calculator will add calories for producing milk.

Close Tobacco User?

Nicotine speeds your metabolism, making you burn calories faster. (That's why people who quit smoking gain weight.) Check this box if you average more than one cigarette, one-half pipeful, one-quarter of a cigar, or one dip of snuff or chewing tobacco per day.

Close Email Address

Once a month, DietPower will send you the most important nutrition news of the past 30 days, selected by national award-winning editors covering hundreds of medical journals. You can cancel this free, no-obligation service anytime with a single click. We produce it only to promote our weight-loss software. It won't put you on other mailing lists—We're Not That Kind of Company™.

Ease

No guide should require you to spend more than five to ten minutes a day logging your meals. Test-drive your leading candidates for a few days. (If they don’t offer free trials, go elsewhere.)

Versatility

An exceptional calorie counter guide will also track dozens of health-sensitive nutrients such as saturated fat, trans fat, folic acid, cholesterol, calcium, and many vitamins. In addition, some show you graphs, charts, or (in DietPower’s case) a single “Nutrition Quotient™” that indicates how well balanced your diet is. Look for a list of features and functions. (You might want to start with the comparison chart at http://www.caloriecounters.com/caloriecountersoftwarecompare.htm.)

Support

Unfortunately, most calorie counter guides offer poor support. Emails go unanswered for days, and phone calls (if you can find a number at all) may never be answered. DietPower is one of the rare ones: we offer both email and 800-number phone support from 9 a.m. to midnight Eastern, 365 days a year. If you look hard enough, you may find others who come close to this -- support hours are easily changed, and we haven’t done a survey lately.

Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of DietPower, Inc.

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