FIGURE D

By increasing my activity level, I can eat as many as 1926 calories a day.

Tracking your food intake
Once you've set up your profile, it's time to start logging your food intake. This process is extremely easy. The icons at the top of the screen are for your meals and snacks. As you can see from my log in Figure E, I had Sunny Delight for breakfast today.

FIGURE E

My daily log shows that I had Sunny Delight for breakfast today.

That item wasn't in the default food database, but it was easy enough to add it. I'll tell you how to add foods in just a moment. DietLog comes with a fairly extensive food database, including beverages, condiments, dairy, meat, cuisine (restaurant food), and entrees (mainly Lean Cuisine frozen dinners). Though not all the listings are perfectly accurate and there are some strange omissions (nectarines aren't in the fruit category), they do provide a good base for getting started.

Logging a food item
In order to log a food item, you simply tap on the magnifying glass icon at the bottom right corner of the screen. This takes you to the Find function of the program, as you can see in Figure F.

FIGURE F

The Find screen is where you go to look for foods to add to your daily log.

In this example, you would tap the down arrow by Category, choose Beverages, and then choose the particular beverage when the item list pops up automatically, as seen in Figure G.

FIGURE G

The Category screen provides you with a listing of every type of food in that particular category.

When you tap on orange juice, it provides a list of all the different options available in the food database. When you tap on Sunny Delight, you're taken to the Nutrition Facts screen, shown in Figure H.

FIGURE H

Here are the nutrition facts for Sunny Delight.

All of the relevant information for this item is displayed. If you had a full serving of 200 ml, you'd just tap Add to Log. If you didn't have that much, you can adjust the serving size accordingly by entering in what you did have and tapping the small plus sign just to the left of the amount. This will recalculate the values and then add it to your food log for the day.

Add foods, recipes, and menus
One of the best features of the program is the ability to add individual foods, recipes, and entire menus to the program. This means that although you might have to do a lot of editing and data entry in the beginning, if you find yourself eating the same meals over and over, you can add them to the database and make subsequent logging much easier. For example, when I first installed the program, Sunny Delight was not listed in the food database. Since I have it for breakfast almost every single day, it was important to me to be able to add it.

Fortunately, the process is relatively simple. First, choose Edit Foods from the Database menu or enter Command E via graffiti. As you can see from Figure I, from there you're taken to the Add or Edit Food screen.

FIGURE I

This is the screen where you can add new foods to the database.