Nutrition Health Center

Choosing a Diet Meal Planner

By Terry Dunkle*

A diet meal planner is an indispensable tool if you’re trying to lose weight. This guide describes the most important features to evaluate in a planner that is either used online or installed on your computer.

Calorie counter try free or buy Download and run DietPower's free trial Purchase DietPower risk-free

Diary Approach

A diet meal planner should function as a daily “diary” -- logging your foods and exercises, calculating your net calorie intake and comparing this with your calorie budget, and also comparing your intake of many other nutrients to the ideal for your age, sex, size, reproductive state, and health concerns.

It should also let you log meals on future dates and show you their calorie and nutrient makeup, so that you can use these as menus.

Food Selection

Avoid any diet meal planner that offers only a few hundred or a couple of thousand foods in its “pantry.” The best planners offer at least 20,000 food -- and they also allow you to add more foods by entering data from labels. (Don’t trust an online planner that lets other people contribute foods, however. These are often riddled with errors and duplicates.)

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

- -

?

ft. in.

lbs.

lbs. ?

- - ?

?

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™.

Exercise Selection

Besides tallying the calories in your food, a quality diet meal planner will also take into account calories that you burn in exercise, which allow you extra eating. A good counter will let you choose from at least 500 forms of exercise -- leisure pursuits, household tasks, sports, and occupational activities. The planner should also factor for your weight, as well as the speed or intensity of each exercise, since these significantly affect the number of calories you earn.

Extras

It’s possible to find a diet meal planner with a lot of extra functions. DietPower (see the ad on this page), for example, tweaks your calorie budget every day to smooth guarantee reaching your goal weight on your target date, and recommends favorite foods that are best for your Nutrition Quotient™, a single score that tells how smart an eater you are. You can find other programs that perform sophisticated services like this; it’s just a matter of examining many to find the few that are exceptional.

Company Integrity

Many purveyors of meal planners fail to offer free trials, money-back guarantees, or prompt and courteous phone and email support. In fact, if you want to rule out as many programs as possible in your search, start by checking this. You don’t want a planner whose company won’t stand behind its product and help you after the sale.

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