1. The Home Screen

The Home Screen appears every time you start up Diet Power. The buttons across the top lead to Diet Power's main functions. (To reach lesser functions, click the menu words User, View, etc., above the buttons.) Be sure to click the red "$" button—it tells how you can become a Diet Power dealer and earn $10 to $12 on every sale.

2. The Home Screen

("Body History" View)

We recommend switching your Home Screen to this view. (Click View > Choose Home Screen¾or just right-click anywhere on the screen and choose the view you want.) Instead of the Diet Power logo, the Body History shows a graph of your progress toward your goal. It will graph your weight, your waist or hip size, your blood pressure, your intake of 33 nutrients, or any other variable you choose.

Shown here is the most popular view¾the Weight History. The red line plots your daily weights. The blue line shows your intended path to your goal. The green line shows your projected path, based on the past 30 days' eating and exercise. Yellow vertical lines indicate days when you started a new diet.

The Body History is also handy for correcting mistakes in your diet records. Just click any date on the graph and Diet Power will let you open your logs for that day, using the same buttons or menus you would use for today. (These are described below.) When you're finished, return to today's date by clicking anywhere outside the graph.

Your daily calorie budget appears under the graph, along with your metabolic rate,calories eaten, calories burned in exercise, Calorie Bank balance, and Nutrition Quotient (NQ).

For more information, click the button at the top of the Home Screen and choose "Body Log, Setting Up Your" from the Table of Contents.

3. The Goal Setter  

Use this button to start a new diet. You can do that in two ways:

• Using the Click and Drag Method (shown here), click the red arrows to adjust the time span and drag the black paddle to your desired weight. Red text at the bottom will indicate how difficult your goals are. When you're satisfied with the goals, click the Adopt Diet button.
   

• Easier: using the Text Entry Method, just enter your goal weight and target date; then click the Adopt Diet button.

4. The Ideal Weight Calculator

(Partial View)

To open this, click the Ideal Weight tab inside the Goal Setter. Besides your healthiest weight, you'll discover your Body Mass Index and whether it's a disease risk.

5. Diet Description

This, too, is a tab inside the Goal Setter. It tells how difficult your diet will be. (If you don't like the description, click one of the Method tabs, change your goals, and click the Description tab again.)

6. The Food Log  

The Food Log is Diet Power's most important dialog, where you'll spend 90 percent of your time. It not only records your meals, but also coaches you to better nutrition.

Logging Foods. In the dictionary window (top), find each food by typing keywords in the Search field ("cake chocolate white icing," for instance) and pressing your Enter key. (We're describing Smart Search, the default method. To try other methods, click the button at top-right.) Then either 1) double-click the food with the left mouse button or 2) point to the food, hold down the right mouse button, drag the food into the log (bottom) window, and release the button.

To save time looking for frequently eaten foods, drag them onto the word Favorites.* Click the Favorites button to open your Favorites list.

Similarly, clicking the Recent button will show foods you've logged in recent days.

You can sort any food list by clicking the NQ+-, Description, or Calorie buttons.

Using the Nutrition Coach. Watch the "NQ+-" column. It shows how much each food will change your Nutrition Quotient (NQ). Avoid gray foods¾they lower your NQ. Green foods raise your NQ (or at least keep it unchanged); Smart Seconds will raise your NQ more than any other food you've already logged.

Monitoring Your Data. To the left of the log is your Scoreboard, where you can watch your Nutrition Quotient, Key Ratio, WaterMinder, and Calorie Tally. These will change each time you record a food.

Getting Nutrition News. The Scoreboard also lets you read daily nutrition news, as well as Food Log instructions and tips.

Other Tabs. At the very top of the Food Log are three other tabs that let you view your Calorie Bank and Nutrient Profile or add new foods to the Dictionary.

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7. Adding Foods to the Dictionary

Although it already lists 11,000 foods under 21,000 names, the Food Dictionary will let you add your own foods (and your favorite vitamin or mineral supplements) by keying in nutrient information from their labels. Just click the Create a Food tab while you're in the Food Log.

8. Adding Recipes to the Dictionary  

Use the Recipe Box to analyze recipes and make them available for logging. (You can also create "recipes" of your favorite meals and log them as single items, to save time.) The Recipe Box works a bit like the Food Log: drag each ingredient from the top window to the middle, type directions (optional) at the bottom, and click "Add to Dictionary."

You can also "doctor" any recipe by clicking the Edit a Copy tab and switching high-fat ingredients to low-fat, salted to unsalted, etc.

9. Printing Recipes (and Other Things)

Like many Diet Power functions, the Recipe Box has a Print button at the bottom. In this case, the printout folds into a 4 x 6 card with the recipe on one side and its nutrient profile on the other.

10. The Exercise Log  

To see how many calories your workout burned, use the Exercise Log. It works just like the Food Log. You'll find more than 1000 activities in its dictionary, from Aerobics to Yoga. Each one's "burn rate" is proportional to your current body weight. (Shown here is the Duration Editor with Speed and Distance, a special calculator that pops up when you're logging an exercise whose burn rate depends on your speed.)

11. Your Nutrient History (Table View)

Click the Nutrient History button to see your balance of 33 nutrients for the past day, week, month, quarter, and year. (To change the time span, click the tabs at the top.) The history is updated every time you log a food. It reports your intake of each nutrient as a percentage of your Personal Daily Allowance (PDA). (You can change your PDAs to any level your doctor recommends. The PDA Editor is on the Options menu.) The history also includes a pie chart showing your "Key Ratio"¾the proportion of your calories from carbohydrate, fat, protein, and alcohol—and a Food Coach that tells you what to eat or avoid if you want to improve your Nutrition Quotient.

12. Your Nutrient History

(Bar Chart View)

If you click anywhere on the nutrient table, it toggles to a two-page bar chart. (To flip between the pages, click More.) Each bar shows what percentage of your Personal Daily Allowance (PDA) you've consumed. The bars are color-coded: red means you're getting too little of a good nutrient or too much of a bad one; blue means the opposite; yellow means "caution." (The definitions of "bad," "good," and "caution" vary from nutrient to nutrient. They're spelled out in each nutrient's chapter in Help.) In general, the more healthful your diet, the more of your color bars will be blue.

13. The WaterMinder™

Click the WaterMinder™ button and Diet Power will show you whether you're drinking enough water. Or just keep logging your foods and Diet Power will automatically warn you if your water consumption is too low. (Automatic warnings are optional. To shut them off, click Options > Miscellaneous at the top of your Home Screen.)

(Don't confuse your WaterMinder with your Nutrient History for water. The two are unconnected. To change your WaterMinder targets, click Options > Miscellaneous at the top of your Home Screen. To change the Personal Daily Allowance of water used by your Nutrient History, click Options > Edit PDAs.)

14. Calendar and Notepad

The Calendar lets you correct your Food Log, Exercise Log, or Body Log for any date in the past. (This comes in handy when you log on in the morning and realize you forgot to record last night's snack.) Just double-click the date and open the log you want to revise, using the same buttons or menus you would use for today's logs. All changes will immediately cascade to today's budget and nutrient charts. When you're finished, return to the present by double-clicking today's date or clicking the Today! button. (The slider buttons move the calendar one month per click; the slider bar moves it one year per click.)

Below the calendar is a notepad, good for keeping appointments or a diary. You can write up to 5,000 words on any date from 50 years ago to 50 years in the future. (To cut, copy, or paste text, right-click anywhere on the pad.)

15. Two Megabytes of Help

Diet Power's web-based Help system (which you are reading now) offers 100,000 words (the length of an average novel) on hundreds of topics, from Alcohol to Zinc. It's also one of the world's easiest to read. And you don't have to search it interminably¾most topics are linked directly to the button at the bottom of the screen where they're needed.

16. The Diet Power Health Shop

Click this button to visit an online store where you can buy the latest version of Diet Power, extra keys to unlock another installation for someone in your household, or a spare CD in case your hard drive crashes or you want to put Diet Power on your second computer.

17. Diet Power Online

The WWW button connects you to web pages containing nutrition and fitness news, features, quizzes, and a lot more. (We add new content weekly.)

Want More?

To learn Diet Power's deepest secrets, read Part II. (This takes seven to ten minutes.)