This wizard will help you setup the preferences and settings for each user of
the food diary. With these selections, you will determine how the program
scores foods, recipes and days. It will also help you determine how many
calories you want to consume each day and which nutrients you are interested
in tracking.
The first decision that you will have to make is what diet to follow. The program has several built in scoring files for various diets. This scoring file has a minimum and maximum daily intake for most nutrients. You can customize everything that these files setup in the later dialogs.
To get more information on those diets, follow the links below. If none of these diets matches how you want to eat, it is probably easiest to start with the USDA values. These will give you a good starting point for how much of each nutrient you need.
Next you need to enter some information about yourself. Your age, gender and weight are needed to calculate how many calories you need per day. Your age and gender are also used to determine how much of each nutrient you should consume each day.
The USDA has provided a Recommended Daily Allowance(RDA) value for each nutrient based upon your age and gender. There are special guidelines for women who are pregnant.
All of the diets listed on the first dialog start with these USDA RDA values.
Next you need to enter your current and target weight. The program will use
these values, the data you entered on the previous dialog and you activity
level to calculate how many calories you need in a day. This calculation is
based off the Harris Benedict formula.
See www.weight-loss-i.com
or Cornell Medical
for more information about this calculation.If you are trying to lose or gain weight, the program will estimate the number of calories you need based upon your target weight. You may want to adjust this target up or down based upon how fast you want to achieve your goal.
If you are trying to lose a considerable amount of weight the program will warn you if your target calories would be too little during the early stages of weight loss. If you receive this warning, manually adjust the number of calories. Then as you lose weight you can reduce the target calories toward your final goal.
Next the program will allow you to pick the nutrients that you want to track and
the amount of each nutrient you want to consume. This screen will start with
the values from the diet you picked on the first dialog. With this dialog you can select which nutrients that the program will track by selecting the "Enabled" check box. For now, don't change the min, max, or weight values on this dialog, the next two dialogs will affect those values and you can come back to this page again to make final settings.
The nutrients that are highlighted green are required. The program uses these nutrients in its calculations so you must include them. These are the same nutrients that are required to be listed on food packaging in the United States.
Nutrients that are colored grey are nutrients that the USDA food database contains information on, but have no RDA values. These are generally uncommon nutrients. If you want to track one of these nutrients, you will have to enter a daily maximum and minimum.
When the program scores a food, it scores each
nutrient and then weights that
score by how important that nutrient is to you. This dialog allows you to set
the relative importance of different nutrients in your diet.The nutrients are divided up into the six categories listed. The value that you assign to a category will be divided evenly among the nutrients in that category. As you change the values, the program will adjust the other values so that the sum is 100.
The changes that you make on this dialog will change the weight column for the nutrients on the previous dialog. If you want to emphasis particular nutrients within a category, like making Vitamin C more important that Vitamin E, you should go back to the previous page and manually update the weights.
The final dialog of the wizard allows you to determine whether you get your
calories from fat, protein or carbohydrates; and how much of each type of fat
you want to get.The numbers listed are the percent of calories you want to get from each macro nutrient. Keep in mind that since fat has about twice as many calories per gram as protein and carbohydrates, that it takes only half as many grams of fat to get the same percentage of calories.
This dialog will start with the values from the diet you picked on the first page. It will look dramatically different if you picked Atkins since very few calories come from carbohydrates.