Best Diet Software?

Nutrition Health Center

Why Do You Want a Salad Calorie Count?

By Terry Dunkle*

If getting a salad calorie count has anything to do with controlling your weight, you’ve come to a terrific page. I’ve been developing diet tools for more than 20 years, and know what separates the good ones from the bad. Here are the most important aspects to watch:

General Approach

The best diet tools use a diary approach. That is, they let you log your meals and exercise every day, tally your net calorie intake, compare it with your calorie budget, and deposit uneaten calories in a bank for eating on subsequent days. They don’t force you to write down your salad calorie count and add it to your tally yourself. They do most of the work so you don’t have to.

Food Choices

Besides a salad calorie count, a good diet program will enable you to find a calorie count for at least 20,000 other foods, including fast foods, brand-name foods, generic foods, and ethnic foods. It will also let you add your own foods to the program by entering facts from the labels. In addition, it will monitor more than just calories. You’ll be able to see your intake of calcium, saturated fat, folic acid, cholesterol, sodium, and dozens of other nutrients important in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other nutrition-related maladies.

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™.

Exercise Choices

A good diet program will also be able to tell you how many minutes of walking, running, swimming, or any other exercise it takes to burn off a salad calorie count. It will base its calculation not only on the intensity and speed of the exercise, but also on your body weight. And it will cover at least 500 different forms of exercise, from sports to leisure and occupational activities.

Intelligence

A few diet programs are smart enough to remember which kind of salad calorie count you usually log, and to put that one at the top of your Found list to save you trouble searching. Some, such as DietPower (advertised on this page), actually tweak your calorie budget daily to keep you trending perfectly toward your goal weight. If you look closely, you’ll find sophisticated functions like this in other programs. Too.

Warranties

Make sure that any diet program you’re considering offers a free trial (of at least a week) and a money-back guarantee. Not to do so is to cast serious doubt on the quality of the product or the company that produces and sells it.

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

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