MyPersonalDiet: The King of PPC Diet Programs

A little more than four months ago, I embarked on what I call a "health plan" and told you all that I would post about my experiences using my Pocket PC to assist in my weight loss efforts. The goal had been to provide a useful blog entry about the various great pieces of software out there that can help you lose weight and stay healthy. But, not surprisingly perhaps, two things happened: first, I gave up on my first health plan pretty quickly; second, I found the first piece of software I used to be so good that I never even tried any others.

Now that I've reembarked upon the health plan path, I've decided to tell you about the tool that's going to help me actually make it through this one: It's called MyPersonalDiet from developer VidaOne.

MyPersonalDiet is a little bit like a Swiss Army Knife: the thing that makes it great isn't the quality of the blade but rather the fact that it does so much. So I'm just going to take you through this program feature by feature. I'm sure I'll miss something, but that's because there's so much to cover.

Setting Up a Diet or a Weight Maintenance Program

If you try MyPersonalDiet (hereinafter "MPD") because you want to lose weight, you can begin by setting up your diet plan. This entails entering your height, current weight, your target weight (MPD assists you by providing an ideal weight range based on your height), diet start date, and diet end date. Once you've entered this information, a summary screen is presented where you will learn how many fewer calories you need to eat per day to achieve your desired weight loss in the alloted time frame. You can also tweak your diet to account for lower or higher daily energy needs, a particular diet (e.g., USDA, low carb), etc.

Setting Up a Diet

If you're not interested in losing weight (I'm jealous!) then you can instead use MPD in maintenance mode. This allows you to just monitor what you eat without worrying about the diet part. The main practical difference between the two is that the diet-related components of the main component are invisible or grayed out throughout the rest of the program.

I'll discuss those three buttons on the right in a few minutes.

The Main Screen: Daily Summary and Diet Summary

The heart of MPD is the day view. The top part is the daily summary where information about your daily consumption of calories and nutrients is displayed. The "BMR" column on the right displays the calories you presumably need to eat to maintain your current weight. The column on the left displays how many calories you've consumed that day and, if you've set up a diet, a horizontal bar displays the amount of calories you're supposed to consume for that day. If you want to view how much of a particular type of nutrient you've had for the day, simply click on the word "calories" in the upper-right corner. Doing so will display a pull down menu where you can select any number of nutrients (e.g., total carbs, protein, fiber, cholesterol, fiber, iron, sodium, etc.). The horizontal bar will remain to tell you how much of the selected nutrient your supposed to have on that day. Finally, above the daily summary you'll see that you can change the day you're viewing, so you can see for example how "well" you did last Friday when you went to that all you can eat buffet!

The "Day View"

The bottom part of the daily view is the diet summary. Here, you're presented with a daunting graph that shows the trajectory of your weight loss, both ideal and actual. The straight-line hypotenuse represents your ideal weight loss. As you fill in information about your daily weight, a second line (a much less straight one) will appear for you to visually compare the trend of your weight loss. If you've elected to use MPD in weight maintenance mode you won't see this graph at all.

If you want to change anything about the diet you initially set up, you can access the diet setup screen and make necessary changes by pressing the "Goals" button on the right. Below it, the "Diet" button is where you change options like whether or not you are doing a low carb diet, how many calories you need to consume per day, caps on nutrients, etc.

Entering Meal Data

Pressing the "Meals" button brings up a menu that allows you to enter data about what you're eating. You have several options here: you can either select from any of the 7500+ items from the USDA food database or you can enter your own. I prefer to enter my own for a number of reasons not really relevant here. The important thing is that you can enter in all the food's nutritional information and add notes and there is even a display view that summarizes how the food item is divided between carbs, protein, and fat.

Entering a New Food Item

Once you've added foods for a particular meal you can also save the meal. So, for example, if you make a sandwich, you might add turkey, bread, mustard, mayo, and lettuce. Once you've added all of this together, you can save this meal so that next time you eat it you don't have to enter each item. The food database is completely searchable (both the default food items and the ones you enter yourself). This is a somewhat summary description of how entering meals works but you get the picture.

Entering Health Data

Tapping the "Health" button brings you to a screen where you can enter a number of different types of information about your health. The main purpose of entering health data is to enter your weight, but you can also add information about your mood, blood pressure, activity level, and the results of various tests you may have taken that day (e.g., Albumin, Cholesterol, Insulin, White Blood count, etc.). Weight data entered on this screen is how the graph in diet summary view is filled in.

Entering Workout Data

If you hadn't guessed yet, tapping on the "workout" button brings up a screen that allows you to enter information about your daily (or biannual) workouts. Here, you can select from a ton of activities (e.g., running, aerobics, baseball, golf, fencing, etc.) and then enter information about how long you exercised, how much you exerted yourself, distance, pace, etc.

Entering a Workout

The really cool thing is that once you enter this information the program will give you an estimate of how many calories you burned. The even cooler thing about this is that once you go back to the day view, you'll see that the little bar that tells you how many calories you can have that day has risen correspondingly! When I go running now I don't think about what's going on around me, I don't think about what I'm doing, all I think about is raising that darn horizontal bar!

Different Ways to View Your Information

The standard view (i.e., the one with the daily summary and the diet summary) is called "day view" but there are three other views that you can use to see your information. "Month view" displays a calendar of the month and allows you to get a summary view of your weight as well as a color coded representation of how you're doing each day (e.g., if you weigh a lot more on one day, the color backdrop will be red, etc.).

"Month View"

"Report view" allows one to view summary charts of information. "Graph view" presents information in graph format.

Viewing a Graph in "Graph View"

For each of these charts and graphs, you can specify the period of time for which you want the information.

Other Features

Other features include:

• A today screen plug-in (I don't use it because I don't want to think about it unless I'm eating)
• Export to .csv
• Full backup

My description of MPD has necessarily been somewhat summary. If you want to get a better idea of how the program works, I suggest you take a look at the user guide.

Any room for improvement?

My only real complaint about MPD is a small one: when you change default options in the process of entering meal data they don't change back. For example, let's say I'm entering a sandwich. When entering the bread I would change the default serving from one to two (because a sandwich has two slices of bread). When I go to enter in the rest of the ingredients, the serving size stays at two instead of reverting to one. This has really messed me up a couple of times because I've accidentally entered in, say, three servings of butter instead of one.

The only other negative, in my opinion, is that if you already use MPD, purchasing an upgrade to the latest version will cost you $14.95, which seems a little steep.

Conclusion

Every aspect of MyPersonalDiet is extremely well-crafted, but the thing that really makes this program shine is the fact that it does so much: everything you could possibly want to record about what you eat, how you workout, and how healthy you are can be entered and tracked. And all of this information can be displayed in more ways than you would have thought possible. As I mentioned above, my initial goal was to review the best diet programs available for Windows Mobile devices, but once I tried MPD I couldn't bring myself to try anything else. This program simply leaves nothing more to ask for in a diet program.