Nutrition Health Center

Choosing an Exercise Diet Journal

By Terry Dunkle*

People who keep an exercise diet journal are far more likely to reach their ideal weight and nutrient balance -- especially if they choose a journal that meets these criteria:

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Large Food Database

Pick a journal that covers at least 20,000 foods and a dozen or more nutrients. Make sure it doesn’t fudge its numbers by counting duplicates under different names -- “string beans” and “green beans,” for instance. Stay away from online journals with foods contributed by users; these are often littered with errors and dupes.

Large Exercise Database

Your exercise diet journal should include at least 500 kinds of physical activity. These should range from leisure and hobby activities to home and occupational tasks, as well as sports and exercise machines. The journal should account for your body weight and exercise intensity or speed when calculating the calories you expend.

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

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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™.

Automation

A quality journal won’t require you to keep any tallies by hand. It will automatically maintain a running account of calories, compare it to a daily calorie budget, and also compare your nutrient intake with the Recommended Dietary Allowances. It will keep the account running across successive days, depositing uneaten calories in a “bank” for use later.

Intelligence

Look for an exercise diet journal that does even more than what is described above. One program, DietPower, continually adjusts your calorie budget to your metabolic rate in order to ensure reaching your goal weight on a schedule. Other programs have “smart” functions like this, too. It pays to search them out.

Seller Promises

Don’t buy an exercise diet journal that won’t refund your money if you aren’t satisfied -- even if it offers a free trial before purchase. It takes many weeks to see whether a journal really delivers what it promises.

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